One of my primary interests as an artist,
as a painter, had always been
to show things that are rarely shown,
to reveal things that are hidden,
to see the unseen
And so one of the things that I noticed,
in terms of the historical narrative of the United
States
is that there're certain aspects
of the historical narrative
that are never really spoken of
and they're never really revealed
And while we talk about the heroism and the foresight
and the vision of the founding fathers,
what we almost never talk about
with the founding fathers is the fact that
at the time that they were writing
the Declaration of Independence-you know,
speaking about liberty and justice
and equality amongst human beings
-almost all of them [chuckles]
were being supported and sustained
by generations of people who had no access
to any of the liberty that they talked about;
neither access to the kind of capital that they
that was required to sustain that kinda life style
The project is organized around showing how slavery
was an integral part to the life of
Monticello and Mount Vernon,
but it's always the element that is sort of not shown
It's like when Gilbert Stuart painted a portrait
of George Washington,
he didn't put a slave in there [laughs]
You know, it's like they didn't do that
When George Washington married Martha,
Martha had 320 slaves of her own, [chuckles]
when he married her
Now, the anamorphosis has to do with the fact that
the kind of image that we have of the founding fathers
is a completely distorted image
Basically, it's like what more effective
device to kind of speak
to the distortion that we have in history,
than to use anamorphosis, basically?
So okay, it's like, when you- if you look at it
from this angle, they look all right
But if you look at 'em from this angle,
head on, they look completely out of whack
What I wanted to do was to take, to have the portrait
of Mount Vernon and Monticello, and put in
and hide in the background there,
if Jefferson owned 150 slaves,
to have all 150 of 'em in there
So it's like, put all of them in there, too
And do not continue to tell the story
of who the founding fathers were, without
telling you that part, too, all the time
And like, and that doesn't have to be
a traumatic kind of narrative
Which is part of the reason why it's in a game,
you know, in a visual game
I had to find ways to do that, without having
to draw 150 people in the picture, for one thing
And so- and actually, the device that I hit upon
to actually include the majority is the connect-the-dots
Every one of those dots in the connect-the-dot is a face
It's a black face You can get a lot of figures in
And not in the obvious sort of kind of way
So they become a tool for helping
you to do something else
in the same way that slaves were a tool to help
the plantation and the house
and all that stuff be able to operate
