Relics
2026
30” x 20” x 39.25”
Mixed Media

When I was a child, a framed, yellowed copy of a document hung on the wall of our home. On it was the signature of my great-great-grandfather, enlisting in the Confederate Army.

I cannot count the times I stared at that signature and wondered what could have burned so fiercely inside someone barely out of puberty, that he would willingly lay down his life for a cause cloaked in the deceptive language of holiness, honor, and glory, while in reality serving nothing more than the interests of wealthy men who profited from human bondage.

Was it "States' Rights"? A battle phrase used to disguise the rights of wealthy landowners to preserve the brutal system that provided them free labor, sexual exploitation, wealth, and power? Was it economics? My family were dirt farmers, barely scratching out a living from the thin, rocky soil of the mountains. Or was it what passed for courage? A corrupted sense of savage virtue rooted in an imaginary heritage of blood purity and white supremacy, built upon the scars, sweat and flesh of enslaved people.

I don't know.

What I do remember is my grandfather occasionally saying, with a laugh, "One day the South's gonna riiiiise again."

But there was nothing glorious about the Civil War. It was a catastrophe measured in shattered bodies, amputated limbs, burned homes, lost livestock, starvation, ruined communities, and families torn apart. Hundreds of thousands died, and an entire generation was marked by violence and loss. The rivers of blood were real. The grief was real. The suffering was real.

And yet, generations later, the old mythology remains.

This sculpture is a crow, a reference to Jim Crow, pulling a Confederate flag from an antique trash can. It is about what we throw away, what we bury, and what we in our ignorance and arrogance, are once again willing to drag back into the light.

The Confederacy lost the war, but the ideas that sustained it did not simply disappear. They survived in the laws, customs, symbols, and stories that followed. And today, men still reaching for white supremacy, power, and grievance once again attempt to pull those same discarded relics from the trash and use them to recruit another generation. One that never witnessed the battlefield, never heard the explosions, never heard the screams, never watched a family bury its sons, and never saw a nation drown in it’s own blood.

The flag is old.

The hatred and cruelty it stands for is not.

Steel, paint, foam, fabric, feathers, wood