America, Under the Rug

I was inspired by the redundancy and irony of requiring students to take U.S. History classes nearly each year in secondary school. The content of what teachers are allowed to follow does not allow a proper evaluation of key issues in the oppression of underrepresented groups, which takes up a majority of this history. African American movements for freedom as well as the oppression of Native Americans do not have nearly the same amount of content for learning as the Founding Fathers and George Washington do. Christopher Columbus gets an entire unit to himself whereas the Trail of Tears gets a 3-sentence paragraph within a greater chapter focused on something else. I am connected to this piece personally because I experienced this education year after year, witnessing the sheer irony of such essential parts of history being overshadowed by city capitol memorization (which I forgot by graduation.) The main focus of this piece is my AP US History book, which was the class all of my historical education led up to. Even in this advanced class, however, the same content was presented to us. The techniques I used to create this piece were intentionally burning certain pages and sticking them on a piece of wood to make the paper seem to curl under the rug, as did most of the essential topics in our learned material. I wanted to present this rich history on paper, albeit lacking, as frozen in time. This is where I melted wax over the colonization chapter to reflect the envelope seals of the time while also hinting at the blood shed as a result of their content that held key decisions of oppression. America, Under the Rug represents the investigation of truth with art.