The Circuitous Path from Family Letter to Artwork

People often ask me how I come up with the ideas for my artwork. The path is never a straight line.

My piece We didn’t recognize the danger is a good example. It has its origins in a letter I uncovered in some family papers. A friend of my father wrote the letter in the 1950s. In the letter, he thanks my parents for their character affidavit defending him and his wife from charges of being a Communist. At the time, the friend was completing graduate school and had to receive security clearances for a government research job.

Looking for historical context behind a family letter

I am so intrigued with this letter and all the questions it raises. Always up for a little research, I went looking for history of the Red Scare in the 1950s and the government’s search for Communists, both real and imagined.

Refreshing my memory, I read about the activities of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover investigating American citizens for no good reason, the blacklisting of subversive organizations, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts, the House Un-American Committee, President Truman’s Executive Order establishing a loyalty program for federal employees, and more.

As I read, I thought about my parents’ decision to speak out on behalf of a friend who was wrongly accused of being a Communist. It must have difficult, potentially creating risks for my father’s own fledgling scientific career.

A lot of people did not speak out. Many reported their family members and neighbors to these fanatical committees. Perhaps those people thought reporting “suspicious” activity was patriotic. Perhaps they thought it would protect them from investigation. Perhaps they were simply afraid and caught up in the hysteria of the day.

I came across this quotation: “Dictators are rulers who always look good until the last ten minutes.” Jan Masaryk, minister of foreign affairs for Czechoslovakia, 1940-1948.

It struck me that one of the terrible things about the Red Scare of the 1950s was how long the public and community leaders tolerated the outrageous behavior and unfounded accusations by people like Senator Joseph McCarthy and FBI Director Hoover. The public’s unwillingness to speak out against slanderous misinformation exacerbated the oppression of more people. It emboldened the power-hungry officials.

Experiments. Re-examination. Iteration.

With those stories in mind, I started making lists of symbols and images that might reveal the concepts I was reading about. I journaled about the letter and imagined what it would have been like to live under the specter of McCarthyism. I played with materials in my studio and was drawn in particular to black metal pieces of a cast-off frames for a storage bin.

With the black metal frame in hand, I drew a mind map of all the meanings it might have. Enclosure. Cage. Wall. Barrier. Screen. Doorway. Transition.

I experimented with photographic images of J. Edgar Hoover. I put his face on the floor of the tableau, then on the ceiling of the wire enclosure. I placed bird figures inside the enclosure, outside the structure, or in-between, emerging into the exposed surroundings. I tried to capture concepts of oppression and resistance in the 1950s by incorporating specific references to the time period.

My early images were met by confused reactions, ranging from “Who is that guy?” to “What is Hoover doing there?”

Okay, that wasn’t going to work.

I tossed out the portrait of the authoritarian leader and dove into the bird imagery. I use birds, rather than human figures, so that they can be universal characters in my narratives. Birds are relatable to people. We anthropomorphize birds because they are so familiar to us.

More iterations led to more birds. Ghostly images of birds on the wire enclosure.

Tiny featureless birds huddled in a corner. A shadow of a powerful bird that flies over head.

More iterations led to more birds. Ghostly images of birds on the wire enclosure.

The metal structure has various meanings

The metal structure surrounding the birds does more than enclose them. The material itself presents a sharp contrast to the soft fluffy creatures. The strong black lines are both beautiful and cold. The structure can be perceived as a cage, but is it really impenetrable? The threatening angled walls close in on the little birds, but how much of the threat is imagined as opposed to real?

We didn’t recognize the danger is the first in a series of pieces stimulated by the family letter. I plan to tell the story in parts through a sequence of tableaus. I’ll show you the others as they take shape.