GRANDMA'S BRAG WALL INSTALLATION: Smaller works are clustered in the manner of family portraits on "Grandma's Brag Wall

PAINTINGS

HOT WHEELS STUDIES

FLY SWATTER STUDIES

ARTISTS’ STATEMENT

DRAFT (Writing this artist's statement hurts me more than it hurts you.)

It's not my place to tell a parent when spanking is appropriate or not.  I don't know how many times the child was told not to play with knobs on the stove. But having been spanked is an experience which is shared by so many that the discussion is multi faceted and worth exploring.

I've noticed that people who were spanked as children laugh about it when they are older.  As a child listening to their stories I could never quite understand their ability to laugh about it but even now, reading stories shared on the internet I still find humor in the telling.

Spanking children seems less common in urban areas where you have a lot of ‘helicopter’ parenting. These parents seem far more likely to feel the practice is never an acceptable option.  In this setting children don’t really have the opportunity to get into the kinds of trouble that ‘free range’ children have.  Kids who had the opportunity to play unsupervised, who had to be home when the street lights came on, had a world of mischief to get into...and a world of self directed, creative play to pursue.

Parents that spank their children were spanked by their own parents.  They aren’t coming up with some new novel torture.  They are doing to their children what their parents did to them and they are doing it in the knowledge that their parents loved them.  You can’t accuse them of not loving their children only of not thinking for themselves.

It seems to me that whipping children is remnant from an agrarian past but I could be speaking from my own Southern and Western heritage.  

After whipping obstinate horses, mules and cows to get cooperation it may have seemed logical for a farmer to do the same to an obstinate child.  The problem is that animals have a thicker epidermis and course, protective hair or hide.   An exhausted, frustrated parent could forget that and not use appropriate restraint.

The argument in the African American community that whipping a child is an inheritance from slave days is best presented by people like the Reverend Nirvana Gayle who addressed the issue on NPR's Leonard Lopate show on June 19th, 2012 and Dr. Stacey Patton in her That Mean Old Yesterday: A Memoir. But there is no shortage of humor in the African American community about spanking. From Medea's parenting advice, "Beat that ass, beat that ass, beat that ass" to the hugely popular episode of "Blackish" in which "Pops, the live-in granddad played by Laurence Fishburne, was sort of fiendishly animated when he bequeathed a vintage 2-foot section of Hot Wheels track—his whupping weapon of choice—to Dad, his son, like a treasured heirloom"*.

Because spanking is a tradition handed down in a family, the series includes “Portraits” of items used to spank children assembled on the wall just like the family pictures at grandma’s house - some in their original frames, some in new discount store frames.

Included are belts, wooden spoons, razor strops, fly swatters, switches, spatulas, wire hangers, slippers or "La Chancla '', extension cords, etc.

Included also is the family tree, the kind you see in a family bible or cross stitched, but in this case it is a family tree made of switches.

*http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2014/10/why_i_liked_black_ish_s_whupping_episode/