Installation · 2026
American Exceptionalism: With Liberty & Justice For...
A large-scale installation of hand-sewn backpacks arranged in the form of an American flag, created to confront the normalization of school shootings and bring victims beyond statistics into visual presence.
Details
- Medium: Backpacks, embroidery, thread, cattle panels, hardware
- Dimensions: Approximately 11 ft × 8 ft
- Structure: Four cattle panels
- Recognition: Best in Show, Senior Seminar Exhibition, 2026
Project Focus
The work addresses the disconnect between public tragedy and everyday desensitization. By arranging individual backpacks into a national symbol, the installation asks viewers to confront the tension between American ideals and repeated human loss.
Artist Statement
I came of age reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, taught to believe in a promise my generation has repeatedly watched break. My work examines the tension between ideals of liberty and justice and the normalization of violence that undermines them.
In Liberty & Justice For … I created 296 hand-sewn backpacks, each embroidered with the name of a life lost to mass school shootings in the US since 1966, and arranged them into the form of an American flag. I use sewing and embroidery as acts of memorial labor. The slow, repetitive process of cutting, stitching, and assembling embeds time, care, and mourning into each piece, countering the speed at which tragedy fades from public attention. The backpack, an object tied to childhood, becomes a symbol of absence when multiplied and emptied. By removing the word “all” from the pledge, the phrase emphasizes those excluded from its promise. Each backpack represents a life with a name, a story, and a future, refusing to reduce loss to statistics.
Through this work, I hope to confront the desensitization that has grown around school violence in the United States. The installation intentionally takes up physical space because these tragedies should not be easy to ignore or move past. By transforming statistics into something tangible and human, the work asks viewers to stand in the presence of the loss, confront it directly, and reflect on the lasting impact this violence continues to have on an entire generation.
