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 Jeremy shares my birthday, December 14th. Composing the victims’ short descriptions for the memorial is like condensing their lives from left-over random facts into a haiku. Excruciating. It is not truly their magnificent essence. But when I paint, space and trace the letters, I feel their spirit. And I hope as you walk by, your eye might catch a glimpse of it. Maybe you feel compelled to spend a minute. Since the mural is still growing, you might discover yet another name & story to be mourned, and known. Their spirit lives on.

          Jeremy "Bam Bam" McDole        Dec 14, 1986 – Sept 23, 2015, Paraplegic, 28 year old,                                                                                                                                     Wilmington,  Delaware

Words – bits and pieces, found online in newspapers, obituaries, funeral announcements – become a truncated attempt to honor a life tragically and cruelly cut short. On the garage doors, each name and entry becomes like a telegram from current (and old) times. Perhaps a found poem. Or is each a message in a bottle? Floating in the ocean of ever-turning times, fate, and death & life. Each individual a son, mother, nephew, bother, grandma, human being, BELOVED. 

Comments

aysha said…
The project of learning respect for one another feels so immense. I grew up here in the US and my family wouldn't go south of the mason-dixon line, or to rural areas in general. I feel so accustomed to violence.

I was so inspired by this mural - the simplicity of honoring the dead on the walls of your home and bringing love and respect into everyday life - that I thought to create a mural of my own, different in content but similar in spirit, by painting my car with colors and quotes from those radical women of color who are at the forefront of struggles for transformational social change. I mentioned this to my landlady, a self-proclaimed "artist", and she returned to me a few days later to request that I don't paint my car in this way, at least not while I am living at her house. Why? Because she thinks it would "disturb the peace" of the 99% white neighborhood where I live.

In such a violent culture, messages of love and respect are seen as threats...
July 19, 2021 at 7:52 PM
Karina said…
Dear "Peace Disturber" – Thank you for what you are doing, and for sharing your story. It makes me very sad and furious at the same time. If "peace" means not acknowledging injustice, then let's have no peace in the "land of the free." I hope some day soon you can paint your car as you describe. It will be fabulous, educational, inspiring, eye opening. And it will be a much needed counter balance to the brainwashing of commercial advertisement. Please send your landlady to my mural, and tell her that my neighborhood has been showing only support, and more conversing and bonding is happening because of the mural! Sigh...
July 20, 2021 at 9:29 AM
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