Artist’s Statement: This artwork is one of a series of portraits of Americans whose actions for social justice helped create a better life for people of color and working people in the United States. Rosa Parks (1913-2005) refused to sit in the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, thereby starting the civil rights movement.

I “paint” with the buttons, picking and choosing colors, shapes, and sizes in order to create a portrait which is not necessarily an exact likeness, but which evokes the spirit of each person. My portrait of Parks contains many elements including a bus token, some buttons in the shape of buses, a wooden puzzle piece in the shape of the state of Alabama, many sewing notions in homage to her work as a seamstress, and political buttons from the civil rights movement.