Misty Morrison

White panicled aster (Symphytrichum lanceolatum)

Aster (Asteraceae)

Volunteer

Fringed loose-strife (Lysimachia ciliata)

Primrose (Primulaceae)

Introduced

Golden groundsel (Packera aurea)

Aster (Asteraceae)

Introduced

Rough avens (Geum laciniatum)

Rose (Rosaceae)

Volunteer

Broad-leafed Enchanter's nightshade (Circaea canadensis)

Evening primrose (Onagraceae)

Introduced

Wrinkle-lead goldenrod (Solidago rugosa)

Aster (Asteraceae)

Introduced

Large-leaved avens (Geum macrophyllum)

Rose (Rosaceae)

Introduced

Narrow-leaf Blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium angustfolium)

Iris (Iridaceae)

Volunteer

Self-heal (Prunella vulgaris)

Mint (Lamiaceae)

Volunteer

Red mulberry (Morus rubra)

Mulberry/Fig (Moraceae)

Volunteer

Black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta)

Aster (Asteraceae)

Volunteer

Hollow joe pye (Eutrochium fistulosum)

Aster (Asteraceae)

Introduced

Wild strawberry (Fragaria vesca)

Rose (Rosaceae)

Volunteer

Virginia knotweed (Persicaria virginiana)

Buckwheats (Polygonaceae)

Volunteer

Tall goldenrod (Solidago gigantea)

Aster (Asteraceae)

Volunteer

False solomon's seal (Maianthemum racemosum)

Asparagus (Asparagaceae)

Volunteer

Daisy fleabane (Erigeron annuus)

Aster (Asteraceae)

Volunteer

Black raspberry (Rubus occidentalis)

Rose (Rosaceae)

Volunteer

Woodland goldenrod (Soilidago caesia)

Aster (Asteraceae)

Volunteer

Beaked hazelnut (Corylus cornuta)

Birch (Betulaceae)

Volunteer

Sawtooth blackberry (Rubus argutus)

Rose (Rosaceae)

Volunteer

Canadian goldenrod (Solidago canadensis)

Aster (Asteraceae)

Volunteer

Common blue violet (Viola sororia)

Violet (Violaceae)

Volunteer

Common cinquefoil (Potentilla simplex)

Rose (Rosaceae)

Volunteer

Early goldenrod (Solidago juncea)

Aster (Asteraceae)

Volunteer

Philadelphia fleabane (Erigeron philadelphicus)

Aster (Asteraceae)

Volunteer

Wild basil (Clinopodium vulgare)

Mint (Lamiaceae)

Introduced

Woodland sunflower (Helianthus divaricatus)

Aster (Asteraceae)

Introduced

Water forget-me-not (Myosotis scorpioides)

Borage (Boraginaceae)

Introduced

Wild mint (Mentha arvensis)

Mint (Lamiaceae)

Introduced

White bergamot (Monarda clinopodia)

Mint (Lamiaceae)

Introduced

Blue vervain (Verbena hastata)

Verbenas (Verbenaceae)

Introduced

Short-toothed mountain mint (Pycnanthemum muticum)

Mint (Lamiaceae)

Introduced

Common trumpet creeper (Campsis radicans)

Bignonias (Bignoniaceae)

Volunteer

Black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta)

Aster (Asteraceae)

Introduced

Devil's beggarticks (Bidens frondosa)

Aster (Asteraceae)

Volunteer

White vervain (Verbena urticifolia)

Verbenas (Verbenaceae)

Volunteer

White snakeroot (Ageratina altissima)

Aster (Asteraceae)

Volunteer

Natalie's lamp

2024

The Bee Balm lamp

2024

Emet's lamp

2024

Elaine & Jeff's lamp

2023

The Meachum's lamp

2023

Quarter Circle Twin Quilt (The Bee Balm quilt / Emet's Harp quilt / Ruth's Slovak quilt)

August, 2025

57"x85"

Half square and quarter circle crib quilt (Kristen’s quilt)

February, 2024

30”x40”

Materials:

Liberty of London fabric gifted to me by my father-in-law at Christmas 2023 from Bolt and Spool, Little Italy, Cleveland. Lightweight denim bought in Connecticut around 2008 and made into curtains in my New London apartment, and then re-sewn for my home in Ohio after. Mustard yellow linen used first for a shower curtain in my Ohio home, then made into a blouse, since de-assembled and used in two crib quilts -- this one and Aydin's. Pale blue linen and red cotton from a thrifted curtain and sheet, both also used in two quilts -- this one, and Emet's big-boy quilt.

Half square triangle quilt (Aydin’s quilt)

October, 2023

30”x40”

Materials:

Coming soon. . .

Half square triangle quilt (Julian’s quilt)

December, 2022

30”x40”

Materials:

Coming soon. . .

Half square triangle quilt (Emet’s crib quilt)

December, 2022

30”x40”

Materials:

Coming soon. . .

Half square triangle quilt (Ellery’s queen room quilt)

February, 2024

60”x80”

Materials:

Coming soon. . .

Half square triangle quilt (Ellery’s crib quilt)

February, 2023

30”x40”

Materials:

Coming soon. . .

Half square triangle quilt (Julia's crib quilt)

February, 2023

30”x40”

Materials:

Coming soon. . .

Half square triangle quilt (Julia's crib quilt)

February, 2023

30”x40”

Materials:

Coming soon. . .

Half square triangle quilt (Ruth's quilt)

February, 2023

70"x90"

Materials:

Coming soon. . .

Seeing What Emet Sees

Oil on duralar

20”x25”

2020

Duckies

Oil on duralar

20”x25”

2020

Wallpaper

Oil on duralar

2020

In luminis oras (into the shores of light)

Oil on duralar

20”x27”

2020

Jeremy & Esther, 90’s

Oil on duralar

18”x25”

2020

Changing

Oil on duralar

2021

Mobile

Oil on duralar

2021

Croci (Iridaceae)

Linocut

24”x36”

2021

Croci (Iridaceae)

Linocut

24”x30”

2021

Pea Family (Leguminosae)

Stone lithograph

24"x36"

2018

Studio process photo: Stone lithography edition Pea Family (Leguminosae) in progress during Ohio University's Alumni Inkahoots. Athens, Ohio. September, 2017.

Pea Family (Leguminosae)

Stone lithograph

24"x36"

2017

Sarah

Woodcut relief print

9”x12”

2016

Red Clover Extract

Relief print

11”x11”

2018

Dad

Woodcut relief print

12”x9”

2016

Joey, Tony & Bistro, you are here

Oil on gessoed panel

48"x96"

2024

Studio photo: Shaker Heights, OH. July, 2024

Studio photo: Shaker Heights, OH. August, 2016.

Oil, graphite, on duralar

42"x40"

2016

Barry (detail)

Oil on duralar

40"x42"

2017

Pattern series, #2

Oil, graphite, on duralar

25"x40"

2016

Oil on canvas

14"x14"

2016

Oil on canvas

48"x56"

2016

Addy

Oil on duralar

12”x24”

2016

Peonies (for Jeremy)

Graphite, oil on duralar

27"x27"

2017

Antlers

Graphite, oil on duralar

24"x30" 

2017

Self portrait with honeysuckle

Oil, graphite, on duralar

26"x23"

2016

Self Portrait

Pattern series, #1

Oil, graphite, on duralar

19"x36"

2016

Lance

Watercolor on paper

9”x12”

2011

Self Portrait with honeysuckle 2

Pen, watercolor on paper

24"x48"

2023

August 22, 2021

“The pedagogic task of the [Truth and Reconciliation] Commission then is not that it has offered new information, but that it has made perpetrators as well as survivors become part of the formation of knowledge through which it may become possible to create a future in which this divided and traumatic past can be inherited.

It is not only in the Commission but in small communities and families away from the eyes of the Commission that work is being done to come to terms with painful memories and to domesticate the terror of the past. Work currently under progress by several scholars suggests that communities fragmented by the violence of apartheid are also responding to fresh possibilities in different and less dramatic ways. Reconciliation is not a matter of a confession offered once and for all, but rather the building of relationships by performing the work of the everyday.”

-- from, “Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery”, edited by Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman, p. 13-14

“In the earlier volume on Social Suffering, Lawrence Langer (1997) focused on the terror of memory for the survivors of the Holocaust: rather than using sanitized terms like “post-traumatic stress disorder,” he so resonantly calls such pain and loss the ruins of memory. Langer’s vision of the anatomy of melancholy among survivors is based on stories told by survivors on video; these tapes are part of the Furtonoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies established at the Yale University in 1982 (see Langer 1991). The context in which the ethnographer listens is (or could be) of a different order, for memory is articulated within local communities through several dispersed narratives in the context of everyday life--it is not seen as already part of an archive. It is in this sense of presence, this idea that the events of violence are not past, that they have the potential of becoming alive any moment, which might explain how hard the survivors had to work to generate new contexts in which enough trust could be created to carry on, once again, the work of everyday life.”

---- from, “Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery”, edited by Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman, p. 18

June 9, 2020

The Atlantic Daily: America’s Fault Lines Are Showing

“CLASS

The coronavirus could create a new working class.

Not everyone can just work from home: Data suggest that benefit lies disproportionately with high-income Americans. And while the wealthy hunker down, essential workers remain at cash registers, fearful for their own health.

Plagues, counterintuitively, can be good for workers, my colleague Olga Khazan reports. One study of 15 major pandemics in history found that they increased wages afterward. Experts anticipate a turn toward populism post-outbreak, but whether it will be the Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump variety is unclear.

RACE

Stop blaming black people for dying of the coronavirus.

We now know for sure: The data show major racial disparities in COVID-19 cases. And yet too many politicians and commentators—relying only on anecdotal evidence—are engaging in victim blaming, Ibram X. Kendi argues.

‘What if black people have been taking the coronavirus more seriously than white people for weeks, as the survey data suggest? What if despite all that, black people are still being infected and dying at higher rates from COVID-19?’

GENDER

This outbreak is a disaster for feminism.

No nurseries, no schools, no babysitters. As child care moves into the home, many families may fall back into a 1950s parenting model.

‘With the schools closed, many fathers will undoubtedly step up, but that won’t be universal,” Helen Lewis wrote last month. “Some women’s lifetime earnings will never recover.’”

From https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2020/04/americas-fault-lines-are-showing/610093/

“The United States would eventually stumble into war and, in the heat of that war, make the political choice to end slavery. But merely ending slavery, thoughtful Americans understood, would not end the inequality slavery had wrought. To guarantee freed slaves the fruits of their labor, America would have to do what the young nation had never done before. America would have to make a conscious political choice to redistribute wealth, in this case land, from those who had too much to those who had none at all. The slaves had been promised forty acres. America would either keep that promise or doom the South to deep and corrupting inequality for generations to come.

The promise would not be kept. America blinked, after the Civil War, and looked away.”

From Greed and Good: Understanding the Inequality That Limits Our Lives, by Sam Pizzigati, p. 421

https://inequality.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/GreedGood-25-historic-struggles.pdf

“The protests come as many areas of the country are still experiencing the most lethal days of the pandemic. While coronavirus cases are dropping in the Northeast, there are fierce flare-ups in rural parts of Southern states like Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. And the Midwest is still troubled by persistent outbreaks: In Wisconsin, hospitalizations are on the rise, and in Minnesota, where the protests began, cases are trending upward.

While the demonstrations were ignited by the death of George Floyd last week, they are also channeling the outrage felt by those who have seen the virus lay bare entrenched inequalities in American society. Covid-19 kills black Americans at a higher rate than whites, and it has stripped black Americans of their jobs and income at an outsize rate.

For many who came out to protest, the virus was the lesser of two risks.

‘I can go home, clean myself up, go get tested, make sure I take proper precautions,” a protester told NBC. “But police brutality, I don’t know, I don’t know what I can’t do to not be harassed.’”

From New York Times Coronavirus briefing e-newsletter, June 1st, 2019.

“As dire as this situation is, though, it also presents an opportunity for us to consider the policies that got us here. The Southern politicians who have passed laws that hurt most of the people they represent have often gotten away with it by talking about their supposed values and calling themselves ‘pro-life.’ But COVID-19 reveals the malignancy of reactionary ‘traditional values’ that simply serve elite interests and corporate profits.”

From The coronavirus will devastate the South because politicians let poverty do so first

https://apple.news/AiNNedIkkR9KpjAOlP4mzjA

“Coronavirus is, in fact, as much an inequality outbreak as it is a virus outbreak. Coronavirus is, in fact, as much an inequality outbreak as it is a virus outbreak. So, what does this inequality look like? After talking with 22 experts, we identified four primary inequalities which coronavirus has amplified: . . .”

https://thecorrespondent.com/461/this-is-what-the-inequality-pandemic-looks-like/8848575527-3639ad28

“All the juggling and the hidden labour of domesticity that is part of many academics’ real lives is now being brought into view ,” he says. “Maybe when those things are raised in the future, universities will be better at understanding.”

From Women’s Research Plummets During Lockdown But Articles From Men Increase, The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/may/12/womens-research-plummets-during-lockdown-but-articles-from-men-increase

May 26, 2020

“‘We have met the enemy, and he is us’

Pogo said it about litterers in 1971, but the comic-strip possum might have been reading the minds of many Americans of today. As the nation starts to reopen, what really worries them, perhaps as much as the coronavirus itself, is the threat they feel from other people’s irresponsible behavior.

…

As the virus death toll in the United States nears 100,000, The Times gathered names of the dead and memories of their lives from obituaries in local newspapers across the country.

‘A number is an imperfect measure when applied to the human condition,’ Dan Barry writes in an accompanying essay. ‘A number provides an answer to how many, but it can never convey the individual arcs of life, the 100,000 ways of greeting the morning and saying good night.’”

From New York Times e-newsletter May 26, 2019, Coronavirus Briefing: Other People

When will I realize when I’m blind

When will I realize when I’m blind

Stars fall down

Burn the ground

No one makes a sound

Waters rise

Drown the skies

No one seems surprised

I got lost

I got lost

I got lost

I got lost

I got lost

I got lost

When will I realize when I’m blind

When I’m blind I’ll see

What is wrong with me

When will I realize when I’m blind

When I’m blind I’ll see

What is wrong with me

Lyrics from When I’m Blind, by Built to Spill (2015)

History, history! We fools, what do we know or care? History begins for us with murder and enslavement, not with discovery.

From In the American Grain, by William Carlos Williams (published 1925)

https://www.abc.net.au/religion/danielle-celermajer-learning-to-live-in-jimmy%E2%80%99s-world/12000232

The log house, Lancaster, Ohio - 1986

Feb. 28, 2020

ALL OF US OF SOUND MIND . . . really care deeply about only one reality in our lives, our own individual health and the health of our loved ones. We want everyone close to us to live a long and healthy life.

But if we are truly of sound mind, we also care deeply about the health of everyone we encounter, not just everyone dear to us. We care about our neighbors, our co-workers, even the people we pass on the streets. None of us, after all, want to live among sick, unhealthy people. Self-interest and altruism reinforce each other here: The healthier those around us, the healthier we individually and those we love are likely to be.

All people around us, unfortunately, are not healthy. We typically cite several reasons. Some people, we note, are born unhealthy. Some people engage in unhealthy behaviors. And some people, we acknowledge, have much less money than others.

This last reality, public health researchers have helped us understand, is “powerfully related” to longevity and illness. People with lower incomes are more likely to suffer heart attacks and strokes, more likely to develop diabetes and cancer, more likely to become disabled. Older Americans in excellent health have, on average, two and half times more income and five times more wealth than older Americans in poor health.

Why are people without much wealth less healthy than people of means?

Low-income people, some analysts contend, simply don’t have access to decent health care. Poor people with health problems in the United States are “only half as likely to see a doctor” as more affluent people. But access alone doesn’t seem to explain why people with more money tend to be healthier than people with less money. Health varies by income bracket, researchers have shown, “even in countries with universal access to care, where health care resources seem to be distributed justly.”

from Greed and Good: Understanding and Overcoming the Inequality that Limits our Lives, by Sam Pizzigati (p. 311)

What was private life like in the feudal age? To answer this question requires a sound method, and there is none better, I think, than to begin with words, to explore the terrain of semantics and ferret out the niche in which the concept of privacy lie hidden. In choosing this approach I feel that I am being faithful to the spirit of learned men of the time, whose function was similar to mine and who, being first of all grammarians, attempted to fathom the unknown by studing vocabulary, by proceeding from what they knew well to what they knew less well.

In nineteeth-century French dictionaries, compiled at a time when the notion of private life first took on its full importance, one finds the verb priver, meaning to tame of domesticate. The example in Littre’s dictionary, oiseau privé (domesticated bird), reveals the meaning of the word: to pluck a creature from the wild and move it into the familiar surroundings of the home. We also find the adjective privé, which in a more general way also suggests the family, the home, the domestic interior. Among the examples cited by Littré is an expression just then coming into current use: “Private life should be lived behind walls.” He proposes the following, highly revealing gloss:

It is not permissible to inquire or talk about what goes on in the home of a private individual [particulier].” As the word particulier in its primary, direct, most common meaning indicates, private is here opposed to public.

In order to understand the meaning of private, we must refer to the word public. Here is Littré’s definition: “That which belongs to an entire people. that which concerns an entire people. that which emanates from the people.”

from A History of Private Life: Revelations of the Medieval World, edited by Georges Duby and Philippe Aries (p. 3)

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/28/coronavirus-truth-myths-flu-covid-19-face-masks

The house on Turner Drive, Lancaster Ohio - 1985

February 21, 2020

IN A CARING COMMUNITY, people think about the future. What kind of society, they wonder and worry, will we leave our children and their children? Greed, by contrast, knows no tomorrow. Accumulate. Consume. Toss. Disregard the consequences.

But consequences, we know now, decades after Rachel Carson first rang the alarm against “the contamination of air, Earth, rivers, and sea,” cannot be disregarded. We are spinning through space on a distinctly fragile planet. This planet, our home, can only take so much abuse.

from Greed and Good: Understanding and Overcoming the Inequality that Limits our Lives, by Sam Pizzigati (p. 359)

In an economy that focused on better, not more, goods providers would make their mark and their money “by adding ingenuity, tasteful design, and efficiency improvements to products,” not by pushing people to buy more and bigger products. The emphasis, notes Marc Burch, would be on making products “more durable, repairable, and aesthetically pleasing.” Large numbers of people would be employed “in maintaining, repairing, rebuilding, and recycling.” A no-growth economy, adds environmentalist Alan Durning, would place a premium on “permanence” and make the all-important distinction “between physical commodities and the services people use those commodities to get.” Few people, for instance, buy cars because driving gives them immense pleasure. Most people buy cars to gain easy access to the places they want to go. In an economy devoted more to better than to more, thoughtfully designed housing and public transportation systems could give people easy access to where they want to go as conveniently as cars.

Societies absorbed in development, not growth, would aim to reduce the amount of energy and materials we drive through the human economy, our “throughput.” They would seek, as economist E.F. Schumacher once noted, to “meet real human needs ever more efficiently with less and less investment of labor, time, and resources.”

But how would we know, how would we measure, if we were making progress toward this noble goal of truly meeting human needs?

from Greed and Good: Understanding and Overcoming the Inequality that Limits our Lives, by Sam Pizzigati (p. 369-370)

I was born into an era when most suburban backyards were still crowded with fruit trees and women and mothers made everything - from clothes, food and compost to jumpers, rugs, macramé wall hangings and crepe paper flowers.

from Grief Baking https://www.mamamia.com.au/grief-baking/, author Megan Spencer

Canal Winchester Ohio - 1983

November 30, 2019

CLOSE, WARM, CARING RELATIONSHIPS, the evidence suggests, are seldom sustained in communities where differences in income and wealth keep people far apart. Inequality stretches the bonds of friendship and caring that keep people close. At some point, even the closest bonds snap. Individuals no longer “cohere.” They become less trusting, as they have in the United States. At the height of America’s post-World War II equality, in 1968, 55 percent of Americans said they trusted others. Three decades of increasing inequality later, in 1998, only 35 percent called themselves trusting.

The larger a society’s income gap, many investigators now agree, the less trust, the less cohesion, the less healthy the lives that people lead. But again the same question, why? Why should people in less cohesive, less trusting environments end up less healthy?

The answer may rest in how, at the most fundamental level, we experience inequality.

Within all societies, however equal or unequal they may be, we experience inequality through hierarchy. We are all born into humanity’s oldest hierarchy, the family. We move on through school, another hierarchy, and then into the workplace, still another. We may play on a sports team or serve in the army or join a theater company. More hierarchies. Some hierarchies we experience may be benign, others cruel. All share one commonality: All hierarchies involve positions of higher and lower status. These differing levels of status may seriously impact our health. Even seemingly minor inequalities in hierarchical status, researchers have found, can make a substantial difference on how long and how healthily people live.

from Greed and Good: Understanding and Overcoming the Inequality that Limits our Lives, by Sam Pizzigati (p. 314)

And as I will show, failing to include the perspective of women is a huge driver of an unintended male bias that attempts (often in good faith) to pass itself off as ‘gender neutral’. This is what de Beauvoir meant when she said that men confuse their own point of view with the absolute truth. The female-specific concerns that men fail to factor in cover a wide variety of areas, but as you read you will notice that three themes crop up again and again: the female body, women’s unpaid care burden, and male violence against women.

from Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed by Men by Caroline Criado Perez (p. 91)

Carroll, Ohio - December, 1993

http://interactions.eldis.org/unpaid-care-work/issues/what-unpaid-care

November 24, 2019

Neighborhoods, Juliet Schor notes, generally bring together households of comparable incomes. If you compare yourself to your neighbors down the street, as Americans typically did back in the 1950s and 1960s, you’re comparing yourself to people with incomes not likely to be much different from your own. Workplaces, by contrast, bring together people of significantly different income levels, particularly when workplaces are offices. In the 1980s and 1990s, Americans of modest means spent their days in these mixed-income workplaces. They encountered, week after week, “the spending habits of people across a wider economic spectrum” than they had ever encountered before. They sat in meetings with people who wore “expensive suits or ‘real’ Swiss watches.” They could see, up close, just how much the affluent own and just how well the affluent live. And they couldn’t match that affluent lifestyle, not even come close, especially in places where riches were rapidly concentrating. Places like South Florida.

“It’s very difficult not to look down at your shoes and sigh,” noted one South Florida sociologist, Lynn Appleton, in a 2001 interview. “You see car after car after car that costs more than your yearly income.” The Joneses, added Appleton, who taught at a university in Boca Raton, never “used to be so hard to keep up with.”

Wealth in the United States had become, in effect, not just more concentrated, but more visible. The inevitable result: a general ratcheting up of the sense of what it takes to live a decent life. One research project, in the boom years, asked people to estimate how much money they needed to fulfill their dreams. Between 1986 and 1994, that estimate doubled. Desires, as Juliet Schor pointed out, had clearly outrun incomes.

“In order to be middle class as our culture is coming to understand the term,” concluded author Barbara Ehrenreich in 1997, “one almost has to be rich.”

…

American families, Schor argued, had become trapped in “an insidious cycle of ‘work-and-spend.’” To afford America’s ever-inflating middle class lifestyle, Americans were spending ever more hours at work.

“Clearly, middle-income families in America have acquired more possessions than their parents and grandparents had,” New York Times reporter Louis Uchitelle would note in 1999. “But the middle-class comforts of an earlier day were accessible to families with just one earner; today, middle-income families find that they must combine at least two incomes, and often three, in pursuit of a life style that seems always out of reach.”

How out of reach? In one 1998 Marist College survey, percent of Americans told pollsters they had difficulty paying monthly bills. A poll conducted later that same year by Peter Hart Research found that percent of Americans felt their earnings weren’t enough to keep up with the cost of living.

Americans kept up anyway, as we have seen, by going into debt. On aver- age, by midway through the 1990s, credit card holders were paying $1,000 a year in interest and fees. In 1996, for the first time ever, over a million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy.

from Greed and Good: Understanding and Overcoming the Inequality that Limits our Lives, by Sam Pizzigati (p. 243-244)

Structural inequality is defined as a condition where one category of people are attributed an unequal status in relation to other categories of people. This relationship is perpetuated and reinforced by a confluence of unequal relations in roles, functions, decisions, rights, and opportunities. As opposed to cultural inequality, which focuses on the individual decisions associated with these imbalances, structural inequality refers specifically to the inequalities that are systemically rooted in the normal operations of dominant social institutions, and can be divided into categories like residential segregation or healthcare, employment and educational discrimination.

Globalization has a complex association with development and inequality, and mandates a new framework to help describe its effects. On one level, global competition in production can lead to productivity improvements that lead to a situation where industrial employment falls behind industrial output in a local market. This can have an enormous impact on developing economies that focus on industrialization. At the same time, the liberalization of trade policies may be the only method of securing growth for land-locked developing nations.

Combating structural inequality therefore often requires the broad, policy based structural change on behalf of government organizations, and is often a critical component of poverty reduction. In many ways, a well-organized democratic government that can effectively combine moderate growth with redistributive policies stands the best chance of combating structural inequality.

From Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_inequality

Carroll, Ohio - 1986

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/09/26/income-inequality-america-highest-its-been-since-census-started-tracking-it-data-show/

November 16, 2019

LITTLE TO CELEBRATE? What about all those statistics? The rising family incomes. The millions of new jobs. The record homeownership rates. The overflowing mutual funds. Economists had never seen such numbers. Average Americans, they believed, ought to be down on their knees, thanking their lucky stars. But average Americans, even before the economic downturn that began in 2001, were thanking no one. How could that be? How could average Americans and economists see the world so differently?

That difference might have been a matter of perspective. Economists read statistics. Average Americans have to live them. That can be hard.

Consider, for instance, those statistics on rising family incomes. The key numbers here, the annual figures for household income, do show increases over time. In 1980, the nation’s most typical households earned $17,710. This national “median household income” did indeed double, and then some, to $42,151 over the next twenty years.

An impressive leap? Not quite. These dollar figures don’t take inflation into account. If we adjust for inflation, the picture changes. Household income still increases over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, but only by $7,000. How significant an increase, over twenty years, is $7,000? Not very. To move from $35,238, the inflation-adjusted 1980 household income, to the $42,151 median income of 2000, household revenues inched up, on average, a meager $346 a year — a less than 1 percent annual income increase.

Still, an increase is an increase. So can we conclude, along with corporate America’s cheerleaders, that average Americans were, at century’s end, making more money than they made back in 1980? We could, but we would be wrong.

Average Americans were actually making less, on an hourly basis, at the end of the 1990s than they made in 1980. In fact, Americans were earning less for their labor at the end of the 1990s, after nearly twenty years of “prosperity,” than they earned in the early 1970s.

from Greed and Good: Understanding and Overcoming the Inequality that Limits our Lives, by Sam Pizzigati (p. 98)

Since the seminal contribution of Amartya Sen (1992) a substantial body of work has converged on the notion that measuring inequality in several dimensions better informs our understanding of the influence of inequality on both individuals and societies since inequalities in different dimensions tend to move together and reinforce each other. In the subsequently large literature that has emerged, a commonly used label for multidimensional inequality is ‘social inequality’, which has been used mostly as a catch-all concept rather than a distinct and coherent concept.5 While the term is sometimes used to refer to multiple disparities in material wealth in society, little attention has been given to its character and specificities (Milanovic 2005; Bollen and Jackman 1985). Social inequality remains a vague concept compared with work on inequality in individual dimensions such as in income (Milanovic 1998; Atkinson 1999), wealth (Cagetti and De Nardi 2008), labour market segmentation, gender and ethnicity (Schrover et al. 2007), welfare status (Layte and Whelan 2003), skills and training (Devroye and Freeman 2002), health (Marmot and Wilkinson 1999), and housing (Morris and Winn 1990), to name but a few.

Our aim here is to develop a framework to better conceptualize and measure social inequality.

from What Is Social Inequality and Why Does it Matter? by Chiara Binelli, Matthew Loveless, and Stephen Whitefield. This draft: 9 December 2013

Carroll, OH - Dec. 1986

https://thehill.com/policy/finance/471135-house-passes-spending-stopgap-measure-ahead-of-shutdown-deadline

November 1, 2019

The aim of the project as a whole is to provide the philosophical underpinning for an account of basic constitutional principles that should be respects and implemented by the governments of all nations, as a bare minimum of what respect for human dignity requires. (Issues of implementation are complex, and I shall give these separate discussion in section VII of this chapter.) I shall argue that the best approach to this idea of a basic social minimum is provided by an approach that focuses on human capabilities, that is, what people are actually able to do and to be - in a way informed by an intuitive idea of a life that is worthy of the dignity of the human being.

...

And I shall argue that the capabilities in question should be pursued for each and every person, treating each as an end and none as a mere tool of the ends of others: thus I adopt a principle of each person’s capability, based on a principle of each person as end. Women have all too often been treated as the supporters of the ends of others, rather than as ends in their own right; thus this principle has particular critical force with regard to women’s lives.

from Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach, by Martha Nussbaum (p. 4-6)

https://thecorrespondent.com/16/what-happens-when-pain-is-a-womens-issue/307108912-03924eed

Jeremy & Emet - Shaker Heights, Ohio - November, 2019

October 27, 2019

Champions of better and wider health care services, they note, have exerted enormous energy over recent years to extend access to affordable, quality care. Yet more, not fewer, Americans now go without health care services. This shameful situation, contends the Daniels team, could have been predicted. In times of growing inequality, advocates for social decency seldom make significant progress in any realm, health included. To be truly “practical,” to actually improve people’s health, Daniels and his colleagues argue, advocates must not “choose between expanding coverage of health care and devoting our energies to changing the social distribution of other resources.” They must do both.

“Popular support for universal health care coverage,” the Daniels team concludes, “arises (when it does) out of a shared egalitarian ethos that is itself a product of maintaining a relatively short distance between the top and bottom of the social hierarchy.”

Where no egalitarian ethos exists, neither will a consensus that society ought to work to keep all people well. Where the “haves” and “have nots” stand wide apart, those with health security simply do not care, enough, about those without. In these sorry places, no secure health safety net will ever be strung. In these sorry places, the social fabric, in essence, has frayed.

from Greed and Good: Understanding and Overcoming the Inequality that Limits our Lives, by Sam Pizzigati (p. 329-330)

According to the Human Development Report of 1997 of the United Nations Development Programme, there is no country that treats its women as well as its men, according to the complex measure that includes life expectancy, wealth, and education. Developing countries, however, present especially urgent problems. Gender inequality is strongly correlated with poverty. When poverty combines with gender inequality, the result is acute failure of central human capabilities. In the developing countries as a whole, there are 60% more women than men among illiterate adults; the female school enrollment rat even at the primary level is 13% lower than that of males; and female wages are only three-fourths of male wages. We do not yet have reliable statistics for rape, domestic violence, and sexual harassment, because in many countries little attention is paid to domestic violence and sexual harassment, rape within marriage is not counted as a crime, and even stranger-rape is so rarely punished that many women are deterred from reporting the crime.

If we turn to the very basic area of health and nutrition, there is pervasive evidence of discrimination against females in many nations of the developing world.

from Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach, by Martha Nussbaum (p. 4-5)

Shaker Heights, Ohio - October, 2019

https://thecorrespondent.com/53/politics-is-failing-but-human-networks-could-show-us-how-to-fix-it/1017298271-bcabce1e

October 18, 2019

WEAVERS CAN ALMOST ALWAYS DISTINGUISH, without much difficulty, quality from second-rate fabric. Quality fabrics will typically be tightly knit. You can tug and twist them. They will not tear. In our everyday speech, we talk about quality social fabrics in much the same way. People within a healthy social fabric, we say, lead tightly knit lives. They care about each other. They join together in community improvement efforts. They give of their time to help others not as fortunate as themselves. They enjoy each other, too.

Within a healthy social fabric, people relish spending time with friends. They welcome neighbors over for dinner. They mingle in parks. They dawdle over bake sales. Within a tightly knit social fabric, people seem to routinely “experience joy in the completion of ordinary life tasks.” They don’t just do their work or run their errands. They forge relationships. Colleagues at work turn into teammates on an after-hours softball team. Chance encounters picking up kids at a day care center start up long-lasting friendships. Afternoons spent raking leaves end up with neighbors sharing ideas. These sorts of relationships between people, over time, build “social capital,” a special sort of grease that keeps the wheels of society rolling smoothly. Societies that accumulate social capital, researchers tell us, aren’t just more pleasant places to live. They seem to function more efficiently as well. People in these societies don’t waste time constantly worrying about whether they can trust other people — because they know these other people, or know people who know them, or know their paths will cross again.

These thick webs of relationships do not, of course, guarantee that people will behave fairly and effectively with each other. But they do increase the odds. They make civility the social norm. They foster “the sense of well-being and security that come from belonging to a cohesive society.”

from Greed and Good: Understanding and Overcoming the Inequality that Limits our Lives, by Sam Pizzigati (p. 331)

Women in much of the world lack support for fundamental functions of a human life. They are less well nourished than men, less healthy, more vulnerable to physical violence and sexual abuse. They are much less likely than men to be literate, and still less likely to have preprofessional or technical education. Should they attempt to enter the workplace, they face greater obstacles, including intimidation from family or spouse, sex discrimination in hiring, and sexual harassment in the workplace - all, frequently, without effective legal recourse. Similar obstacles often impede their effective participation in political life. In many nations women are not full equals under the law: they do not have the same property rights as men, the same rights to make a contract, the same rights of association, mobility, and religious liberty. Burdened, often, with the “double day” of taxing employment and full responsibility for housework and child care, they lack opportunities for play and for the cultivation of their imaginative and cognitive faculties. All these factors take their toll on emotional well-being: women have fewer opportunities than men to live free from fear and to enjoy types of love - especially when, as often happens, they are married without choice in childhood and have no recourse from bad marriages. In all these ways, unequal social and political circumstances give women unequal human capabilities.

from Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach, by Martha Nussbaum (p. I)

Cleveland Clinic Main Campus, University Heights, Ohio - October, 2019

https://thecorrespondent.com/53/politics-is-failing-but-human-networks-could-show-us-how-to-fix-it/1017298271-bcabce1e

October 11, 2019

ADVOCATES FOR A MORE EQUITABLE AMERICA, a century ago, saw their campaign for social justice as essentially a two-front struggle. A good and honorable republic would emerge, these advocates believed, if more wealth accumulated at the bottom of America’s social order, less at the top. Wise nations, James Madison had argued years earlier, seek to “reduce extreme wealth towards a state of mediocrity, and raise extreme indigence toward a state of comfort.” Social justice activists one hundred years ago shared Madison’s perspective. The fewer tycoons, the fewer paupers, the better the republic would most certainly be. For progressives, the task appeared straightforward. They needed to “level up” the lowly, “level down” the high and mighty.

Today, a century later, crusaders for social justice have largely given up on “leveling down.” Contemporary social justice activists devote their energies, almost exclusively, to strategies that might help America “level up.” And who can fault them? In today’s political environment, thinking about “leveling down” can seem a colossally futile waste of time. The “extreme wealth” that so worried generations past now worries virtually no one of import in American public life. America once had Presidents who railed against “malefactors of wealth” and “economic royalists.” In modern America, grand fortunes go unchallenged. No American under sixty has ever heard a prominent elected leader, in an important public forum, express a case, any case, against concentrated wealth.

Most people serious about social justice, as a consequence, don’t think much about leveling down. They concentrate instead on “level up” activism, on advancing initiatives that can help poor people amass income and wealth. This single-minded attention to “leveling up,” as a strategy for reducing inequality, can certainly be justified. “Leveling up” approaches, after all, can help close the gaps that separate the wealthy from everyone else. If poor people are improving their economic status faster than rich people are improving theirs, gaps between top and bottom will most assuredly narrow. Leveling up, as an approach to fighting inequality, also carries another attraction. No one prominent in American public life “supports” poverty. Everyone, all American political leaders agree, deserves an opportunity to get ahead.

from Greed and Good: Understanding and Overcoming the Inequality that Limits our Lives, by Sam Pizzigati (p. 457)

We should specify what relation is in general. Relation distinguishes itself from being, insofar as one understands “being” following the example of common tradition and grammar as an intransitive verb. (We won’t explore this further, but it is Heidegger who asks that we understand being as transitive, as if to be and to make or to take had the same syntax.) Relation is not exactly transitive---it is transitivity, transit, transport. It is the effect [l’efficace] of one subject toward another, with its reciprocal necessity, and it thus involves the transport between them of some thing, force, or form that affects them both [l’un de l’autre] and modifies---or at least modalizes---them both [l’un par l’autre]. Relation suggests modification, modalization, and modulation, rather than substance, instance, or essence. Relation suggests, if not transformation in the fullest sense of the term, at least the displacement, movement, or alteration of form.

from The Pleasure in Drawing, by Jean-Luc Nancy (p. 67)

https://blog.apaonline.org/2019/10/22/the-humanitarian-crisis-of-deaths-of-despair/

Oct. 6th, 2019

THE END OF WORLD WAR I, in November 1918, would also end America’s first great offensive against plutocracy. By 1920, in fact, apprehensions about “plutocracy” had almost totally vanished from mainstream political discourse. A new vocabulary now dominated American politics. Americans no longer worried about the wealthy. They feared “Bolsheviks.” That fear, stoked into hysteria, would smother the egalitarian reform spirit — and usher in the most rich people-friendly years America had ever seen.

The hysteria that did the egalitarian spirit in had actually begun during the war. The struggle against the Kaiser’s armies, President Wilson had proclaimed, would “make the world safe for democracy.” The war, instead, would imperil democracy within the United States. Throughout the war years, lawmakers and judges would systematically trample basic civil liberties. Dissent would be treated as disloyalty. Agitators would be silenced, even lynched. By war’s end, federal and state officials, egged on by national “loyalty” groups, had blanketed America’s political landscape with a thick, stagnant smog of suspicion. In this foul atmosphere, social reformers could not see, or even breathe.

Trade union activists would try to persevere anyway. They had little choice. Workers were hurting. Millions had lost their jobs when the war ended. Those with jobs faced an inflation that had slashed purchasing power by over half since 1913. Workers, in response, hit the bricks. The year 1919 saw one of the greatest strike waves in American history. Over 4 million workers walked off their jobs.

Many never walked back. America’s industrialists, notes historian Robert Murray, were “spoiling for a fight.” They had been on the defensive for years, scorned by muckraking journalists, reformers, and even Presidents of the United States. Now they would go on the attack. Striking trade unionists, they charged, were fomenting Russian-style Bolshevik revolution. America’s wartime superpatriots, organized in groups like the new American Legion, would quickly pick up the theme, and the “Red Scare,” as 1919 advanced, would start to feed heatedly upon itself. Teachers lost their jobs for not evincing appropriate levels of patriotic fervor. The Methodist Church Federation for Social Services and other reform-minded religious agencies were denounced as “leaning toward Bolshevism.” In the South and Midwest, the Klan re-emerged as a major presence. Race riots destroyed entire African American communities. In this atmosphere, wrote a visiting English journalist, no one could venture “the most innocent departure from conventional thought” without risking the “horrid” radical label.

from Greed and Good: Understanding and Overcoming the Inequality that Limits our Lives, by Sam Pizzigati (p. 434)

Form is the “idea,” recalling the word chosen by Plato to designate the intelligible model of the real. Idea signifies for Plato, according to the Greek term, nothing other than ”visible form” (to which one might add that the “visible” is form’s primary register of reference, because that register maintains form in the foreground, distinct, and in this way “formed.” By contrast, and according to another distinction, drawing [dessin] opens form to its own formation). In fact, the most recent translations of Plato substitute “Form” for the more traditional “Idea.” “Intelligible form” takes nothing away from the field of the visible; it demands only that this visibility adapt, not to the immediate and interested perception of things, but to the judgement and aim [viseé] of their sense and truth. Just as the visible form of the table presents us with its use and affordance [disponibilité] as furniture, whether for eating, writing, or climbing up on, so the “idea” of the table (tabula rasa, multiplication table, tablature) carries the sense of a general affordance for … affordance itself, in other words, the form of a surface on which things are arranged, the way form comes to light [mise en evidence] and presence (to sit down at the table, to put something on the table, the negotiating table, the Holy Altar [la Sainte Table]). This form gives sense of truth to the “table.” One must thus understand that “sense or truth” (employed here as equivalents) are far from constituting simply the “intelligibility” of the sensible. At the same time, this intelligibility is nothing other than a more demanding, more intense grasp of sensible propriety itself. Or yet again, in distinguishing these two terms, one could say that the truth is the point of moment of interruption of the movement and opening up of sense. Interrupted, suspended, the drawing/design of sense [le sens en son dess(e)in] reveals at once it tracing out [tracé] (its substance or bearing) and the truth, which is not its completion but, on the contrary, its very interruption.

from The Pleasure in Drawing, by Jean-Luc Nancy (p. 5-7)

My Dad’s surprise 30th Birthday party - Carroll, Ohio - October 5th, 1989 (5 years before he would retire from Union Ironworking)

https://dataspace.princeton.edu/jspui/bitstream/88435/dsp01gx41mm54w/3/620.pdf

Sept. 29, 2019

But inequality, Vilas argues, creates a danger to democracy that goes far deeper than power imbalances. Democracies, he points out, require citizens. And inequality, most poisonously of all, undermines citizenship.

To be a citizen, in any democratic sense, an individual must have autonomy. You must be free to speak your own mind. Most all nations that call themselves democracies have written the right to speak freely into their basic constitutions. But this right, on paper, does not guarantee an individual the autonomy necessary to speak freely. People who fear losing their jobs should they speak what they see to be truth do not feel autonomous — or free. They feel dependent, on others.

To feel autonomous, and free, individuals must enjoy at least a basic level of economic security. Economic security, in turn, requires certain limits on the behavior of a society’s most powerful economic players. If employers are able to threaten to pull up stakes and move elsewhere unless their current communities deliver the subsidies the employers seek, individuals in these communities will not feel autonomous and not behave freely. The decisions they make will be made under duress, not in the democratic spirit of free and open debate. The more inequality, the more duress. The more that wealth concentrates, the more dependent those without it become on those who have it. In the most severely unequal societies, these dependencies force people without wealth onto their knees, turn them into submissive clients looking for powerful patrons.

“Patron-client relations of domination and subordination,” notes Carlos Vilas, “tend to substitute for relations among equals.”

In environments like this, the most dominated, the most deprived, come to believe that only the most powerful of patrons can guarantee their security. Vilas notes one example among many from Latin American history: In Peru’s 1995 presidential election, the vast majority of Peru’s poorest people voted for Alberto Fujimori, a power-hungry strongman bitterly opposed by the Andean nation’s democratic political parties and trade unions.

In societies deeply split by income and wealth, people also become less and less able to visualize life on the opposite side of the economic divide. People at the bottom increasingly identify only with kith and kin, their own narrow religious or ethnic group, not with any broader community. People at the top, meanwhile, increasingly pledge allegiance to the corporate entities that provide them wealth, not the society they share with their less fortunate neighbors. Amid these social dynamics, all sense of “shared belonging” to a single common society tends to fade. Democracy, to thrive, needs this sense of shared belonging, the conviction that you and your adversary, however much you disagree, share some elemental basic interests. In severely unequal societies, few feel these common interests. Democracy withers.

from Greed and Good: Understanding and Overcoming the Inequality that Limits our Lives, by Sam Pizzigati (p. 402-402)

As a propensity, then, “Rembrandt’s drawing/color” is “Rembrandt” himself, or “Rembrandt’s art.” This singularity or originality is situated beyond style or talent. Irreducible to any form of analysis, it is no doubt best indicated by affirming this singularity or originality as “art,” in other words, as a savoir-faire or know-how that exceeds all knowledge and all making. This is not a question of “genius” (a word about which we should remain guarded, and for good reason), but rather the thought of this excess, a thought of the unthinkable and unfeasible (the unspeakable and unrealizeable). Each time that it takes place, this thought as such can only be single and singular, without possible substitution, like all truth.

from The Pleasure in Drawing, by Jean-Luc Nancy (p. 2-3)

Carroll, Ohio - 1990

https://time.com/5678605/one-woman-and-millions-of-people-to-back-her-up-how-elizabeth-warren-made-fighting-corruption-a-feminist-rallying-cry/

Sept. 20, 2019

WE CANNOT, CONCLUDES HERMAN DALY, “grow” forever. Current human economic activity is already preempting one-fourth of what scientists call “the global net primary product of photosynthesis.”50 This economic activity cannot possibly be multiplied five- to ten-fold without forcing a fundamental environmental breakdown. The economics of “more” simply cannot deliver an American standard of living to everyone on Earth. For everyone’s sake, Daly and other ecological economists contend, we need to reject “growth” as our be all and end-all.

But if we were to say no to “more,” wouldn’t we be consigning the world’s poor to perpetual second-class status? And if we tried to narrow global lifestyle differentials, in a world that wasn’t producing great amounts of more, wouldn’t average people in rich nations have to be content with less? To improve the lives of the poor, in a no-growth world, wouldn’t we, in effect, have to degrade the lives of everybody else? Are we faced, in the final analysis, with a choice we don’t want to make? Must we either brutalize people to protect the Earth or brutalize the Earth to protect people?

In fact, argues Herman Daly, we do not face this choice. We do not face a choice between more and less. We face the choice, as a world, between more and better, between economic growth and economic development.

These two notions, growth and development, often get confused, a confusion that may stem from how we think about growth in our everyday lives. We speak, for instance, about children growing. Children who grow, we all understand, are becoming larger in size. But we also talk about adults growing. We might say, for instance, that a newly elected office-holder has “grown” in office. We don’t mean, of course, that this elected official has become larger in size. We mean simply that this official has matured — developed — as a person. Herman Daly draws this same contrast between economies. An economy that “grows” gets larger. An economy that “develops” gets better.

from Greed and Good: Understanding and Overcoming the Inequality that Limits our Lives, by Sam Pizzigati

Drawing is the opening of form. This can be thought in two ways: opening in the sense of a beginning, departure, origin, dispatch, impetus, or sketching out, and opening in the sense of an availability or inherent capability. According to the first sense, drawing evokes more the gesture of drawing than the traced figure. According to the second, it indicates the figure’s essential incompleteness, a non-closure or non-totalizing of form.

…

Drawing participates in a semantic field where act and force [puissance] are combined, or where the sense of the act, the state, or the being that is in question cannot be detached entirely from a sense of gesture, movement, or becoming. The word drawing draws itself along or draws itself forward before all disposed form, all tracing out [trace], as if initiating a trace that must always be discovered again–opened up, opened out, initiatied, incised.

In the idea of drawing, the word itself can also designate an essential suspension of an achieved reality. “Here is a drawing by Rembrandt” only gives us the impoverished factual and informational meaning of the word, whereas the expression “Rembrandt’s drawing” reveals a quite different value. For Rembrandt’s drawing is Rembrandt’s own manner of drawing. It is a collection of characteristics that distinguish his drawing. Furthermore, it is also the role that drawing plays in his work, the way drawing plays out within the work, either within the paintings or as a separate exercise, whether in sketches, studies, or engravings.

from The Pleasure in Drawing, by Jean-Luc Nancy (p. 1-2)

https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-benefit-corporation-movement/

Sept. 14, 2019

“ON APRIL 27, 1942, only months after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt presented to Congress a proposal to limit the income of any one American. At a time of ‘grave national danger,’ the President advised, ‘no American citizen ought to have a net income, after he has paid his taxes, of more than $25,000 a year.’ The nation’s “discrepancies between low personal incomes and very high personal incomes,’ FDR urged, ‘should be lessened.’

Not all Americans would agree. The New York Herald Tribune quickly labeled FDR’s $25,000 limit — about $300,000 in current dollars — ‘a blatant piece of demagoguery.’ Many wealthy Americans, adds historian Kenneth Davis, felt ‘angry outrage.’ But few newspapers across the country would, in the end, echo the Herald Tribune’s fury, and wealthy Americans, by and large, would keep their outrage ‘prudently muted.’ Hardly any average Americans, the wealthy realized, shared their anger. The President, most Americans believed, was merely stating what needed to be said. At a time of national crisis, the rich needed to pay more in taxes, a great deal more. No one in their right mind, most Americans agreed, could possibly object to that notion.

Sixty years later, another American President, George W. Bush, would object to that notion. Amid a new national crisis, a war against terror, this President would insist that America’s wealthiest citizens should pay not more in taxes, but less, a great deal less.”

from Greed and Good: Understanding and Overcoming the Inequality that Limits our Lives, by Sam Pizzigati (p. 415)

“A sketch (Entwurf), Heidegger says, a term for which one retains above all the meaning of jet (werfen—“throwing, casting”), of projection toward what continues to come [le non-advenu], leaving in shadow the value of the mark, the tracing out, the form in the process of forming itself.

To exist is to sketch oneself [s’esquisser]. One would like to write s’exquisser—to open oneself to a form which shows itself in the movement of its uprising [surgissement]. No one would consent to live if they did not experience this desire—to open oneself to the desire of (letting oneself) being drawn to the outside.”

from The Pleasure in Drawing, by Jean-Luc Nancy (p. xii)

Sweet Autumn Clematis / Clematis terniflora

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/warren-says-her-tax-plan-asks-just-two-cents-of-the-super-rich-but-how-much-of-a-hit-would-gates-walton-and-their-peers-actually-take/2019/09/11/d279a84c-d495-11e9-9610-fb56c5522e1c_story.html?wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1

Sept. 8, 2019

“AVERAGE AMERICANS, IN 1913, WOULD HAVE MUCH PREFERRED a considerably higher tax rate on wealthy incomes. Most Americans, by that year, had become acutely aware of the inequality all around them. Great strikes in the urban centers of the East had dramatized the massive gap between capital and labor — and blue-ribbon committees and commissions had documented that gap. In 1912, for instance, the House Banking Committee, chaired by Arsene Pujo from Louisiana, revealed that just two financial groupings, the Morgan and Rockefeller empires, controlled a tenth of the nation’s wealth. America, the Pujo Committee charged, faced “a vast and growing concentration of control of money and credit in the hands of comparatively few men.’”

from Greed and Good: Understanding and Overcoming the Inequality that Limits our Lives, by Sam Pizzigati (p. 432)

“Between drawing out and showing—an asymptotic contact—there is something to discover. To show, to make something seen, to designate—designare—is also what accompanies the demonstration through which a conclusion or lesson is drawn. One draws—one traces or extracts—in order to show. One shows by extending or spreading out in front of oneself. Better, in order to show something well, in order to render it fully manifest, one must not cease drawing (if only to draw attention), and in order to draw out (trace or pull), one must not lose sight of the invisible extremity of the mark [trait], the point by which the line advances and loses itself beyond itself in its own desire.

The gesture of showing by extending—extending in order to show or bring to light, extracting the lineament and incision of a form, contour, sense, or idea from the shadow or a compact mass—such is the gesture of existing.”

from The Pleasure in Drawing, by Jean-Luc Nancy (p. xii)

Red Clover / Trifolium pratense

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/09/08/new-hampshires-democratic-convention-explains-lot/

Holding a family photo, Shaker Heights, Ohio, 2018 (family photo from Canal Winchester, Ohio, 1981)

Invitation to “The Family System”

The planning stages of “The Family System: ‘I ain’t got no home in this world anymore’”

“The Family System: ‘I ain’t got no home in this world anymore’” - UnSmoke Systems, Braddock, PA. July 11th, 2018.

“The Family System: ‘I ain’t got no home in this world anymore’” - UnSmoke Systems, Braddock, PA. July 11th, 2018.

Composite photo documenting“The Family System: ‘I ain’t got no home in this world anymore’” - UnSmoke Systems, Braddock, PA. July, 2018.

Elaine & her memory of home - UnSmoke Systems, Braddock, PA. July 7th, 2018.

Cameron & her memory of home - UnSmoke Systems, Braddock, PA. July 7th, 2018.

Cameron & his memory of home - UnSmoke Systems, Braddock, PA. July 8th, 2018.

Composite photo documenting “The Family System: ‘I ain’t got no home in this world anymore’” - UnSmoke Systems, Braddock, PA. July, 2018.

Anna & her memory of home - UnSmoke Systems, Braddock, PA. July 7th, 2018.

Emery & her memory of home - UnSmoke Systems, Braddock, PA. July 7th, 2018.

Composite photo documenting “The Family System: ‘I ain’t got no home in this world anymore’” - UnSmoke Systems, Braddock, PA. July, 2018.

Steph & her memory of home - UnSmoke Systems, Braddock, PA. July, 2018.

Eileen & her memory of home - UnSmoke Systems, Braddock, PA. July 7th, 2018.

Eileen & her memory of home - UnSmoke Systems, Braddock, PA. July 8th, 2018.

Folks from Braddock and Wilkinsburg talking in the kitchen - UnSmoke Systems, Braddock, PA. July 28th, 2018.

Genevieve & her memory of home - UnSmoke Systems, Braddock, PA. July 11th, 2018.

Sarah & her memory of home - UnSmoke Systems, Braddock, PA. July 7th, 2018.

“The Family System: ‘I ain’t got no home in this world anymore’” - UnSmoke Systems, Braddock, PA. July 11th, 2018.

(Sarah’s memory of home hangs on the wall alongside prepared panels for Haylee & John, one day to be oil on gessoed board, 4’x8’)

Composite photo documenting “The Family System: ‘I ain’t got no home in this world anymore’” - UnSmoke Systems, Braddock, PA. July, 2018.

“The Family System: ‘I ain’t got no home in this world anymore’” - UnSmoke Systems, Braddock, PA. July 11th, 2018.

Suzanne & her memory of home - UnSmoke Systems, Braddock, PA. July 7th, 2018.

Scale-shot; "Oblivion", Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, March 31-July 23, 2017. (Photo by Jeremy Bendik-Keymer)

"Oblivion", Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, March 31-July 23, 2017.

"Oblivion", Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, March 31-July 23, 2017.

"Oblivion", Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, March 31-July 23, 2017.

"Oblivion", Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, March 31-July 23, 2017.

"Oblivion", Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, March 31-July 23, 2017.

"Oblivion", Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, March 31-July 23, 2017.

Studio photo: UnSmoke Systems, Braddock PA. February, 2017.

Deinstallation photo: After the Nelsonville Square Fire, April 2015.

2015

Oil on canvas

66”x36”

2015

Oil on canvas

92”x54”

2015

Oil on canvas

64”x96”

2015

Oil on canvas

77”x104”

2015

Oil on canvas

91”x67”

2015

Oil on canvas

72”x104”

2015

Oil on canvas

72”x104”

2015

Oil on canvas

84”x50”