"We want to thank the entire prosecution team, … We want to thank community support, everybody who has been out there that has supported us in this long fight for accountability." Katie Bryant, the mother of Daunte Wright. From CNN article

"Accountability is not justice. Justice is restoration. Justice would be restoring Daunte to life and making the Wright family whole again. Justice is beyond the reach that we have in this life for Daunte. But accountability is an important step, a critical, necessary step on the road to justice for us all." Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison From CNN article

MINNEAPOLIS — The former police officer who said she mistook her gun for her Taser when she fatally shot a man during a traffic stop in a Minneapolis suburb was convicted of two counts of manslaughter on Thursday, a rare guilty verdict for a police officer that is likely to send her to prison for years.

The jury deliberated across four days before agreeing on guilty verdicts for Kimberly Potter, a 49-year-old white woman who testified that she had never fired her gun in her 26 years on the police force in Brooklyn Center, Minn., until she shot a single bullet into the chest of Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man who had been driving to a carwash in April. See New York Times Article 

WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT (OH, REALLY? DREAM ON…) is a song for the dispossessed. The abused, refused, and misused that continue to walk amongst us. The nullified, the revoked, and the denied, who for one reason or another, haven’t had access to the motherload of human rights that exist, at least in theory, in a venerated realm where universal needs, and exalted aspirations, are perpetually fulfilled. 

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. Who could argue with that? It’s electrifying, even in its simplicity, and wise enough to be appropriate for all eternity. Sadly, however, there’s a glitch. A major screw-up. Somebody forgot to include an operator’s manual. And without that manual, it’s empty rhetoric; idle words. That recognition is the wellspring of this artwork. 

Let’s start with Thomas Jefferson, the author of the aforementioned quote. Since he forgot to ensure guarantees to protect enslaved Black Americans, as well as the grievously usurped Native Americans, I decided to create a Black Jefferson (Tom-Z) and a Native American Jefferson (Tibone). Keep in mind that Jefferson did, in fact, have bi-racial children, and he spent many years of his life with his Black liaison, Sally Hemings. 

The remainder of this painting fills in other gaps left by Jefferson. Women, for Christ’s sake, weren’t included in the Declaration of Independence, so I included them, in the form of a drawing, in the upper right-hand corner, of Mary Wollstonecraft, and to the right of that drawing is her book, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. It was published just 20 years or so after Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. How could Tom-Z forget that?  

At the top left corner of this painting is a drawing of Oscar Wilde, and to the right of that, is a drawing of his one-act play Salome. Not surprisingly, LGBTQ rights were conspicuously missing, too; hence their inclusion herein. Radcliffe Hall was inserted for the same reasons. Her caricature appears to the left of Tibone, and right above her portrait, is her book The Well of Loneliness, which was the first widely distributed overtly lesbian novel. Published in 1928, it was banned shortly thereafter. Since the novel is based on the efforts of a World War I ambulance driver, I included a folk-art version of a 1920s-era ambulance to signify the novel.  

Lastly, the most conspicuous image in this painting is the portrait of a bi-racial beatific face. It’s meant to embody the tenets of shared universal wisdom, with a particular emphasis on happiness. Happiness is enshrined in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and it is the unifying theme of all measures of peace, justice, and liberty. 

The rational of this artwork was thus to extend Jefferson's words to American’s of all stripes. That seemed a better fit to me.