Title: Erased American History (after erasure)
Date of Work: 2025
Size: 30" x 45"
Material: Chaulk Pastel on paper and eraser shavings
Synopsis: Erased American History is both an act of remembrance and reckoning. The work reimagines the 1863 photograph of "Peter," or "Gordon," the formerly enslaved man whose whip-scarred back became an emblem of abolition. Through erasure, the image dissolves into a field of fading red pigment--fragile, atmospheric, incomplete. The act of erasure here is not denial but transformation: the body becomes both ghost and monument, refusing disappearance. The red evokes blood, rust, and clay--signs of violence and endurance. Referencing Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing, the work asks not just what happens when an image is erased, but who has the right to erase. Created amid efforts to sanitize American history and remove Peter's image from museum view, the piece transforms absence into presence. Each stroke of the eraser becomes resistance--an insistence that even what is erased can still bear witness.

Afterglow is the light, energy or feeling that continues after the source is gone. While the viewer sees a building what the building represents is the presence of someone who has been lost. That which is left behind after the person is gone. The memories that remain, the unrealized potential that could have been, all the feelings and emotions that remain. Upon a closer look at the building you might realize there is no structure supporting the floor slabs, the building is an empty shell like the sheet of a cartoon ghost. The slabs reach for the sky and are are stacked like the accumulation pf years that have passed and then abruptly discontinued. The only thing holding it up is the transparent glass facade that reflects our image holding us as part of this cloak that supports this memory and reflects back at us the afterglow.

Painted at Artfields 2025 during the plein air competition. My depiction of the Continuum building in Lake City, South Carolina.

SAUL ST. / LAKE CITY Crosswalk mural designed and executed just prior to the 2025 Artfields Festival and Competition.