National Bird Night 1970

 

National Bird Night 1970 

(Acrylic, ink, and paper on 3x5' canvas)

The 1970's started off with a bang for me. We were living in the projects, that's council housing to my British friends, and poor as church mice. We got every scrap of welfare the Great Society provided, this was before massive tax cuts and right wing efforts to take welfare away from poor and working class people and give it to the rich white men in the form of corporate welfare and tax cuts. We were one of three white families in our neighborhood which was 'on the wrong side of the tracks' as the saying goes. 

The big greenish building represents the small apartment we lived in inside of the building. And when I say 'we,' I mean my mother, my mentally ill father, when he was well enough to come home, and my four siblings and I. It was a multi family building and from it we could see the big brick houses of the rich white people across the busy highway who they wanted nothing to do with poor people like us. The massive Roman Catholic church St. Monica's was also across the street. Mother took us to mass there and when we could escape the priests, we'd play football on the huge manicured lawn on the church grounds. The priests would shout at us and run us off.

The woman kissing the child in the bottom right corner represents my mom kissing my big sister, she was 9 yrs old, I was 8, Linda goodbye. We kids were going to the store to spend what little coins we managed to get from various places. The car on the left represents the car that would hit and kill my big sister as we tried to cross a busy car filled highway on our way to the little store where we bought penny candy, comic books, and cheap toys.

The girl under the street lamp represents all the girls I had crushes on and the bird looking up her dress is me, I got in to trouble for looking up a girl's dress in school. I was curious, I want to see what made them so different and alluring. The Vietnam war was raging and film of dead and wounded soldiers was on TV every night and the plane dropping the bomb represents Nixon's love of bombing and killing innocent people he didn't like. 

We had a playground behind our apartment building but all the action was playing in the street in front of our house. The kids playing on the old car on the left represents that. And the figures in the streets and in the windows represent all the neighbors who watched out for kids and for the cops, there was still left over tension from the 1967 riots and no one in our neighborhood trusted cops,

In 1970 I harbored dreams of becoming a baseball star for my hometown Detroit Tigers, so the numerals are outlined in their team colors. 

This is not a happy work since it deals with the death of my sister that I witnessed, but it is happy in that it represents the last day my mother was happy and before Linda's death crushed her and her spirit. The light behind her eyes went out and she was never the same after that day. But she carried on and did her best, she still had four kids and a husband to look after.