About the Pieces

The president of El Salvador has suspended all human rights in a “gang emergency.” Tens of thousands of Salvadoran citizens are being rounded up into a giant new mega prison, expected to hold around 40,000 inmates in row upon row of metal bunks, stacked 4 high in great cages, without so much as a mattress to sleep on. None of these people is being allowed lawyers nor, in many cases, any contact with the outside world. President Bukele has been posting horrifying images of people being displayed in their underwear, paraded across concrete, shoved into each other in long, dehumanized, columns of humanity. He has been bragging that they will receive no comfort, not even a mattress, and that they will be left behind these walls to rot.

There is plenty to delve into here, and I probably have no business painting this because I am not there, and the images I’m using as reference photos were taken by Salvadoran state media and photo journalists on the ground. (I prefer not to paint from photos that I did not take, when I can help it.)* But I couldn’t not process this through art.

There is so much to unpack with this. The inhumanity of these images, especially given the braying brags of politicians, is the creepiest thing I’ve seen in many years. Not since soldiers in the US military photographed their own psychopathies out of Abu Graihb have I seen anything this grotesque on such a level as this.

But I did not want to just paint some maudlin, simplistic, morality piece, decrying “Man’s Inhumanity to Man” [sic]. Because that’s already right there, in the original photographs from the scene. It did not need me to point it out. It is blatantly obvious.

The thing I needed to paint was the nuance. This is a very hard look at what it means to be part of our species. This isn’t an easy story, and there is plenty of grey space. Because it turns out that, at least if the press is to be believed (and that’s always an open question), the vast majority of people in El Salvador are in favor of the crackdown. In fact, it turns out – again, if the press I’ve seen is to be believed – that the same angry, grifting, hooting, self- entitled, would-be “warlord” males that are plaguing most human societies way too far into the 21st century, have been murdering, raping, and pillaging El Salvador under gang colors for decades and it seems the people are just done with this. I’m not sure I can blame them, even if it’s also pretty clear that many of the people rounded up here are political prisoners and not “gang members.” I’m certainly in no position to judge the things one chooses in order to survive under conditions like those that have been going on in El Salvador for decades.

In fact, I’m getting pretty sick of violent, unaccountable males myself. I’m tired of the school shootings and the running down of pedestrians. Tired of state violence and street violence. Tired of having to walk with keys between my fingers all my life as makeshift weapons – a thing all women know but men do not. Tired of angry, hollering men feeling entitled to use the rest of us as spoils in an endless thunderdome of self- described “strong men” (gag). From angry men rampaging around Maralago to angry men rampaging around San Salvador, it feels like it’s long past time for some accountability. But… at what cost to our souls?

This is a real question for me. While I might feel all sorts of compassion for these men I’ve never met, from the perspective of someone who has never been harmed by them, I can’t say the same thing about the Angry Men in my own country, who have harmed me. For example, if I’m honest with myself I find that I might not mind seeing every last neo nazi, incel, or treasonous magat thrown into a cell like this. Whether or not one sees that as a false equivalency, the cost to the soul feels the same.

So when I look at the images coming out of the mega prison down south, I hold two very different things in mind at once. I see a bunch of angry males, covered head to toe in gang graffiti, their very bodies made into billboards celebrating the harm they’ve caused to others in their communities, but who are very likely mixed in with a lot of innocent people who were swept up with them in the feeding frenzy. And I see horrendous human rights abuses, that seem wrong no matter who is subjected to them.

It’s hard to look at this. And important to look anyway. What I felt I had to paint here was this jarring tension between the best of us – the part with compassion that wants to spare anyone from this kind of suffering – and the worst of us – not just the part that would do the things some of these people allegedly did to get there, but also the part of us that’s all right with watching this happen to people we feel harmed by.

Those of us outside the frame of canvas are forced to reflect on what it means about us, that we have so many violent males among us, that we don’t know what to do with them all, and that… this is what we have done with some of them. (Again, to be clear, it is also what we have done with a good deal of innocent people who are not being allowed lawyers to tell the world that they are innocent).

I do not know any of these men’s stories, other than the words they’ve chosen to have written on themselves, and where they are now. I want to have the kind of compassion that would embrace them kindly in this moment without reference to how they got here. It should not matter what they did, in the equation testing whether or not this is wrong. But maybe it still feels like it does to people who feel harmed by them, and maybe it still does to me, too, when I’m not just speaking from a theory about how the world “should” be, but reflecting on how it is. What does that mean? That’s the question with which I approached this canvas.

*When I do use someone else’s photo for reference, I credit the photographer… but in this case, the only credit given that i can find so far is “Reuters photographer.”