This artwork will be in the form of a proposal for a multi-part installation to take place at the Mall area, Washington

D.C. It will consist of the following text, mock-up images of the two projections, the bronze sculpture used to make one of the projections, a video playing the video for the other projection, and a large landscape architect-style rendering of part of the installation. Pub. L. 102-166 (or are we moving backward?) In 1991 President George W. Bush made an attempt to abolish affirmative action claiming that any regulation, rule, enforcement practice or other aspect of these programs that mandates, encourages, or otherwise involves the use of quotas, preferences, set-asides or other devices on the basis of race, sex, religion or national origin are to be terminated as soon as is legally feasible." <http://www.lexisnexis.com.proxy.longwood.edu/hottopics/lnacademic/> This lead up to the Civil Rights Act of 1991, basically an amendment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; fortytwo titles were amended but Congress was not able to pass the primary purpose of the amendment, that being to eliminate racial quotas. According to Ward Connerly "Diversity" (Forced Diversity or Artificial Diversity: Diversity used to be a perfectly good and descriptive word which meant "variety". In the 1990's the racial quota industry co-opted the term Diversity to have a distinctly political, pro-quota meaning. ) makes a mockery of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and its command that the government treat all of us equally "without regard" to the factors of race, gender and ethnicity. "Diversity" is an excuse to discriminate. -- Ward Connerly, as published in The Egalitarian, August/ September 2005, Volume 8, Issue 3. Non-discrimination means treating everyone fairly without regard to race, gender or ethnicity. Conversely, Diversity means hiring or promoting based upon race, gender or ethnicity until your business has employed the "right" numbers of each protected group as defined by the government. The two terms actually have nothing to do with each other, and as the term Diversity has become to be used, the two are actually antonyms. http://adversity.net/Terms_Definitions/TERMS/Diversity.htm By the Civil Rights Act of 1991 failing to ban racial quotas, even though that had been President Bush s intent for the new law, it could be argued that the 1991 amendment actually weakened the great move forward that was the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Act that had finally created a legal foundation for equality. Installation: Rows of different varieties of magnolia trees and shrubs that from an aerial view would look like a bar graph. The different number of trees in each row would represent different quotas . The actual number for that variety of tree would be derived at by the

completely arbitrary process of multiplying the average height of the tree by the average diameter of its flower, whereas the total number of trees would be 43, the number of title changes that would have happened if the Civil Rights Act of 1991 would have included an end to the racial quota system (there were 42 title changes made). The use of trees in art installations is not a new idea as it builds off of Martin Puryear s Camera Obscura in which he used an old cherry tree cut from an orchard that was strung up by a chain from a wooden structure reminiscent of a gallows, and Natalie Jeremijenko s Tree Logic and OneTrees projects which both use living trees. In Puryear s Camera Obscura, his intent was to illustrate that the idea of landscape is a cultural construct through the creating of this inverse reality of how the tree (metaphor for the landscape) would look through a camera obscura, that landscape is nature under the hand of man, or man looking at it. However, as the sap ran down the inverted tree to the branches it began to flower. This, coupled with the wooden structure it was suspended from having a gallows-like look resulted in the piece being interpreted as being more about the violence being done against nature, and how it could be possibly be viewed as being similar to the casual violence that was inflicted against the slaves a century and a half earlier. In Jeremijenko s Tree Logic, the trees have been suspended upside down, but alive in pots. As tree growth is effected by gravity and sunlight, the inverted trees will now grow in response to the new direction of gravity and light relative to the trees positions. This installation gets at what is the nature of natural , in a way revisiting Puryear s original intention for Camera Obscura. With OneTrees, which is made up of 1000 cloned trees, the intent is quite different. Here the issues of genetic engineering, climate change, and the effects of the environment in shaping an organism are at the heart of the project. For Pub. L. 102-166 (or are we moving backward?) the use of different varieties within a species will be used to address what racial diversity and racial equality mean. I hope that through the use of a flowering species of tree, that as they come into bloom there will be strong associations with Puryear s piece and the idea of racial injustice of the lynchings that his piece ended up representing for many. By using the magnolia, a tree often associated with the South, there will likely be additional associations with the racial injustice of our nation s past. I also, through using different varieties of trees as a metaphor for different races of humankind, want to remind the viewer of the beauty of each individual variety / race, and that we are all of the same species, homo sapiens. - Video made from still photographs taken from a short section of film of the March on Washington, 1963. These images would be taken every 1 to 2 seconds (I will experiment with this to see what gives the best effect); then convert the images to their negative image and then have them arranged in progression forward then backward. Project this on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

-Large scale projection of my decomposed bronze torso sculpture on the Washington Memorial with the Capital Building in the background.