MashUp 2023: Pyramid’s Annual Members Exhibition from Pyramid Atlantic

Creator’s statement about this piece:
Ex-President Donald Trump obsessed over being targeted by “witch hunts” and fake news highlighting inconvenient truths about him, history, and the state of the nation. In his march to political power he unleashed a storm of latent white supremacist hate, quantified among the count of 838 active hate groups. The illogical reasoning of people expressing this hate suggests that they have not (yet) examined an objective history of slavery and its central place in the continued operation of white supremacy. This piece is a small acknowledgement that slavery and the belief of racial superiority that allowed it is a national wound. This political, social, economic, and personal wound has scarred the conscience of our country. The imagery in this piece referencing the triangle of “goods”: alcohol, sugar, tobacco, and enslaved Africans points to the commodification and de-humanization wrought by the slave trade. The shackles are central to the design of slavery, a symbol and fact of torture and containment. The American Colonies did not act alone in enslaving people, especially people of African descent. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to capture Africans and force them into ships, bound (in all meanings of the word) for Portugal and its colonies around the world. All of us need to grapple with the results and remainder of this existential equation of how to move forward knowing this history, our entwined history. We (especially white people) can start by facing the uncomfortable truth of the history and listening closely so as to hear the muffled voices speaking from the margins of what we think we know. Without such knowledge we will remain unenlightened about the transgressions of the past, and at risk of perpetuating them. Those acting in the name of G-d against peaceful protest and coexistence, seeking war with others with whom they disagree, claiming power only for personal gain, and working to maintain the status quo of racial inequality, beg the question: who is the Philistine?