ITERATIVE AND ONGOING

I began this series in 2012 when I was in my MFA program. My father had just passed away from cancer a couple of weeks before my graduate program began.

This series emerged from my desire to hear my father continue to joke about the absurdities of FBI agents surveilling him, a monk-like graduate student, finding that he was being summoned to defend himself against “undisclosed charges.” This was part of what is now known as COINTELPRO, a state-sanctioned effort to target those seen as activists and dismantle political movements. My father did not know what the charges against him were, but he did learn that they were serious. He was classified as a “threat to the state.” My father was an immigrant, in the United States on a student visa, and found himself ensnared in covert political policies that would reshape his life.

To this day, the surveillance enacted against my father remains shrouded in secrecy. My family obtained the FBI’s surveillance files on him, released through the Freedom of Information Act, but they are heavily redacted. After my initial exhibits of my father’s FBI files I came to accept the redactions and adopt them as painterly backgrounds for my own drawings and prints.