BARSON (Original Painting)

Acrylic paint, acrylic marker, oil pastels, book covers, graffiti paint markers, book pages (John Milton's essay on liberty of the press and John Locke's essay on reading), sharpie, highlighter, india ink, gel medium, glow-in-the-dark pigment powders (blue, pink, green, yellow), mirror chrome marker, adhesive, holographic prism powder, and spray paint.

PEN America, a literary and free expression organization, published an article earlier this year that grabbed my attention and shook me to my core as a lover of books: from July 2021 to June 2022, over 1,600 individual titles were banned in 138 school districts across 32 states. Most of the books targeted by local, state, and national groups for removal featured LGBTQ+ characters or characters of color, and/or cover race and racism in American history, LGTBQ+ identities, or sex education. The censorship movement, shockingly, continues to grow, even targeting public libraries with intimidation, harassment, and attempts to suspend or defund entire libraries. And then there are the book burnings.

It confounds me how book bans and burnings continue to happen, much less here in America, since history has taught us all too well what the burning of books leads to. On the back of the canvas, I recreated the memorial in Berlin dubbed the Empty Library, embedded in the ground of the Bebelplatz where the May 10th, 1933, book burning by the Nazi's occurred. It is a 5' x 5' cavity of shelves approximating the space of those 20,000 lost books. Beside the memorial, the words of German poet Heinrich Heine are engraved: "Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well."