Federal Building, Oklahoma City

On April 19, 1995 Timothy McVeigh parked a rented Ryder truck outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The truck was loaded with a home-made bomb. McVeigh lit the fuse and walked away. At 9:02 that Wednesday morning as employees were settling into work for the day, the bomb exploded killing 168 people including 9 children. In addition to decimating a third of the federal building, it also damaged or destroyed over 300 other buildings and dozens of other cars. It was in short, the most destructive act of domestic terrorism in the history of the United States.

The small physical scale of these drawings is meant to bring attention to the grand scale of these events, both physically and in their lasting impressions on our national psychology. There are a few defining moments in each generation’s collective memory that we all remember, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the assassination of President Kennedy, 9/11. These drawings explore that national collective experience in small meditative vignettes.