Sugar Daddy
During the height of the pandemic, I worked at Henry Street Settlement food pantry on the Lower East Side. We received 600 food boxes per week. Each of these boxes was packaged with a letter signed by Donald Trump, expressing his care for the communities receiving food assistance. We made a collective decision to remove these letters from every box we delivered. I made 45 panels of low-relief sugar castings encapsulating some of the letters I saved while I was working. Arranged in a grid, my intention is to emphasize the museological display.
Sugar Daddy addresses the inequalities of race and class in systems of labor, production and capitalism. What are the implications of buying sugar in a time when some of the largest sugar companies still enslave workers in the Caribbean? Where does race as artifice, visual apparatus and actualization intersect? It is a confrontation of the myth and truth of the state as an immovable force and challenges the values of stability, linear time and progress under neocolonialism. These objects are not spectacles, they are spectres of both the future and the past.
Medium: sugar and paper
45 panels, 14 x 10 inches each
2022
