National Bird Night 1972

National Bird Night 1972

(Acrylic, ink, and paper on 20x24" canvas)

In 1972 things looked dark for all of us. Nixon was bombing the shit out of Vietnam, his war on drugs was really a war on black and brown dissent after years of institutional racism, and we had four more years of putting up with him after the election in 1972. Watergate had went down but no one knew yet it would bring Nixon down and cement his place in history s a crook. 

On the bright side George McGovern had opened up the Democratic party and broke the death grip that old white men held on the party at that time. He helped open the door for women, more people of color, and LGBTQ people to come inside the previously smoke filled backrooms where the real decisions were made in the Democratic party. We also saw the great Shirley Chisholm run for the Democratic Party nomination. She was a black woman and for her to run was a heroic and historic thing to do, women, especially black women had historically been shut out of the corridors of power and she helped lead the way for many more to come after her in her wake. She and McGovern remain some of my heroes.

The lavender bird represents the breakthroughs the gay community was making in the USA and worldwide. They had been labeled as mentally ill for being born homosexual. I remember my mom insisting us children go upstairs when a gay man my dad became friends with in a mental hospital came over to visit him at our home. It's sad to think my late sweet little momma swallowed the lies that went around about gay folks back then, she was afraid he was going to molest us or some shit while across the street from us was a Catholic church full of priests who were raping kids and everyone looked the other way. 

The dark background represents the unease I felt at the time. Things looked bleak to me. Four more years of war, police brutality, state sanctioned oppression of anyone who disagreed with Nixon, and more of dealing with the trauma of watching my sister get killed and how it affected my mother. I was ten years old and I thought things got better as you got older. I found out the next year how wrong I was.