The Unofficial Presidential Portrait of Barack Hussein Obama
Acrylic and oilstick on unstretched canvas
152.4cm X 416.56cm (60″ X 164″)

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Detail from The Unofficial Presidential Portrait of Barack Hussein Obama

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.Detail from The Unofficial Presidential Portrait of Barack Hussein Obama

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.Detail from The Unofficial Presidential Portrait of Barack Hussein Obama
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(click for full view)

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Coup d’etat
Acrylic and oilstick on three unstretched canvases
369.5cm X 180cm (145.5″ X 71″)

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Zimbabwe
Acrylic on unstretched canvas
152.4cm X 312.42cm (60″ X 123.42)

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Cell 49
Acrylic and oilstick on chipboard and wood frame
109cm X 80cm (43″X 31.5″ )

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Drink Coca-Cola, Farkhunda, Drink Coca-Cola
Acrylic and oilstick on wood
56cm X 122cm (22″ X 48″)

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The Binding of Gutiérrez
Acrylic and oilstick on stretched canvas
76cm X 122cm (30″ X 48″)

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American Supper
Acrylic on wood
109cm X 212cm (43″ X 83.5″)

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Jusqu’ici Tout Va Bien
Acrylic on wood
104cm X 75cm (41″ X 29″)

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Achilles
Acrylic on wood
91.44cm X 200cm (36” X 78.75”)

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Rotten Tomatoes
Acrylic on wood
118.11cm X 74.93cm (46.5 X ”29.5”)

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Nedā
Acrylic on wood frame and glass
57.78cm X 47.62cm (22.75” X 18.75”)

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We Know Who You Are, Fucker
Acrylic on particleboard
49.53cm X 134cm (19.5”  X 52.75”)

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American Jihad
Acrylic on MTA map and chipboard
57.15cm X 72.39cm (22.5″ X 28.5″)

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Avatar
Acrylic on Pressure Cooker
27.94cm X 45.72cm (11″ X 18″)

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ji·had
jəˈhäd/

noun
1. a holy war undertaken as a sacred duty by Muslims.
2. any vigorous, emotional crusade for an idea or a principle.

Human life is cheap against the wall of ideas. The Florida cop with a glock aimed at the unarmed civilian, the American sniper with crosshairs on the head of a woman or child, or the ISIL fighter with the knife on the throat of a journalist. All believe an idea in their head is more important than human life.

We live in the age of Jihad but it’s not a recent invention. It’s older than modern humans and found even in our cousins Chimpanzees who wage war. But the bullet, knife or bomb is not god, just a violent manifestation from the mind of the malignant narcissist where grandiosity is built around aggression and the destructive aspects of the self become idealized. Erich Fromm’s definition is equally comfortable with toxic religious ideologies enabled by violence as well as in western democracies where the murder of young men and women cast as heroes is celebrated as a sacrifice for good. Even more terrifying is the cool law of percentages, aka collateral damage, designed to white wash images of relatively low numbers of children blown to pieces by drones.

The human with nothing to lose is most dangerous when imprinted with a nihilistic ideology. An idea can be a powerful force to motivate an individual to self-annihilate while at the same time murdering families out buying vegetables, or opposing ideas, two states having a stare down with nuclear missiles.

As the idea gains power the value of human life plummets.

 

When a fresh faced Obama was elected in 2008, the first black president, the world appeared to sigh in collective relief. The Nobel Foundation awarded Obama a preemptive peace prize only eight and a half months into his presidency, a gesture of good will after eight destructive years of Bush and his preemptive wars built on what many scientists would say was a false flag operation on 9/11. In my naïveté I believed that it could be that moment in time when an FDR or Kennedy would manifest and alter the consciousness of a world gasping for peace and justice and civility. 

Eight years and over 100,000 bombs later, 26,171 in his last year alone including civilian casualty estimates as high as 3398, Obama was rumored to say to top aides, “Turns out I’m really good at killing people.”

It’s easy to mythologize Obama now, like presidents before him, some elevated to god-like status like Washington, who in contrast to the cherry tree myth was in reality a mediocre battle tactician at best, a social climber who slept with his best friend’s wife and married for money, ruthless in business and who advocated for the brutal whipping of his slaves, even pursuing the slaves freed by the British during the Revolutionary War with pathological vengeance. Obama’s presidential portrait has now entered into that pantheon of the cult of presidential personalities, many of whom were rapists, slave owners and genocidal killers in their own right, especially now that his successor may go down in history as one of the most psychopathic, virulently racist, toxically misogynistic personalities to have ever not won the popular vote.

Drone strikes have increased more than 50% and civilian deaths 215% under Trump. Nazis march the streets. Children in cages. Nuclear wars threatened via Twitter. The Republic, if not fatally wounded with the inability of Eisenhower to curb the power of the military industrial complex and with the murder of Kennedy, is certainly dead now. Not by a bullet to the brain but by a thousand cuts.

We have now officially entered our age of Caligula.

Coup d’etat
Mixed media on unframed canvas
369.5cm X 180cm (145.5″ X 71″)
Top to bottom:
Desaparecidos
113cm X 170cm (44.5″ X 67”)
Footnotes
113cm X 170cm (44.5″ X 67″)
Frame 313
113cm X 180cm (44.5″ X 71″)

John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald are married in the collective consciousness of the world as victim and shooter, a view religiously advanced by the media, taught in high school history books and stated factually without irony on Wikipedia. Yet a massive body of opposition exists beginning at the highest levels of government including three members of the Warren Commission -Chief Justice Earl Warren, Richard Russell and Hale Boggs, to innumerable researchers, historians and witnesses (the ones who were not erased from existence in a plague of improbable deaths to odds figured as high as 100,000 trillion to one) that suggest a conspiracy of multiple shooters, and not including Lee Harvey Oswald and the un-sightable Carcano rifle. Investigations by French intelligence and the KGB would come to the same conclusion: that LBJ was behind the assassination, a view shared by both Jackie Kennedy and Jack Ruby.

After the assassination the body of JFK was illegally removed from the Texas State homicide investigation by the Secret Service. When the body arrived at Bethesda Naval Hospital it had already been descecrated, a gash on right temple to remove evidence of a frontal shot to advance what would become the Warren Commission finding: that the fatal head shot came from the rear from a bullet fired by Lee Harvey Oswald. The conclusion was in opposition to the testimony of every doctor at Parkland Hospital who universally described the head wound as a massive exit wound in the occipital parietal, unlike the official photos allegedly taken at Bethesda Naval Hospital which show a small neat entrance hole in the back of the head. In a final insult JFK’s corpse was laid out nude in full view of his former enemies -the Joint Chiefs of Staff and generals including Curtis LeMay, who sat and smoking a cigar.

JFK is my favorite president for two reasons. One, his engagement with Khrushchev for a nuclear test ban as a first step to end nuclear proliferation. And two, His decision not to invade Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which saved the world from nuclear holocaust.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis the Joint Chiefs of Staff advised for an invasion of Cuba believing that warheads sent by Khrushchev were not yet operational. In a 1975 interview Fidel Castro revealed the missiles were operational and that the Kremlin had authorized nuclear retaliation in the event of a US invasion with one hundred warheads aimed at US cities. Kennedy, disillusioned and bitter over the gross incompetence of his military advisers in the planning and execution of Bay of Pigs, shut down the invasion. It was the second time Kennedy would save the world from nuclear holocaust, having shut down a preemptive nuclear strike that had been in the works since 1957, presented to him in July of 1961 by top military and intelligence leaders when he disclosed to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, “And we call ourselves the human race.”

After the assassination, Castro was deeply disturbed. He had believed Kennedy was the only hope in advancing peace between the two nations.
Kruschev wept.

Cell 49
Mixed Media on Chipboard and Wood Frame
80cm X 109cm (31.5″ X 43″)

The buzzing sound of the electric wires is still stuck in my head

In 2003 of the Iraq invasion American soldiers dumped severed body parts on a football pitch in the al-Amiriya district of Baghdad. Ali Shallal al-Qaisi, the owner of the pitch, contacted foreign media where he expressed his horror at the incident and his name and photo were published. In retaliation, American soldiers raided his home arrested him and took him to a detention facility in his neighborhood before transferring him to Abu Ghraib.

At Abu Ghraib Qaisi was stripped, hooded with his shoes on his head and beaten with rifle butts when unable to climb a spiral staircase with feet restrained. Tied up in a stress position he was penetrated with broomsticks and rifle barrels and tortured with electrical wires. In cell 49 Qaisi was refused food for three days, blasted with loud recordings and doused in cold water in December. Still, he could hear the sounds of dogs barking and men being tortured as well as women detained opposite the men screaming for help. Naked in his cell, all he could do was recite Allahu Akbar.

Qaisi was released after photos of Abu Ghraib torture and abuse were leaked to human rights organizations and underwent six surgeries for his injuries at the hands of Americans.

“I wasn’t a military commander or a government official. I was just a resident of Baghdad, where I grew up, and just like any other Iraqi I was against the US invasion and I spoke out against it.”

Mixed media on wood
56cm X 122cm (22″ X 48″)

I am a Muslim, and Muslims do not burn the Quran!

On March 19, 2015, Farkhunda Malikzada was dragged from the Shah-Do Shamshira Mosque in Kabul Afghanistan where she was beaten with sticks and pummeled with stones, stomped, kicked, thrown from a roof and run over by a car. With cries of “burn the witch” her broken body was set on fire and thrown onto the banks of the Kabul river.

The western press reported that she was mentally ill, which was untrue, a lie perpetuated by her father to avoid further violence on the family. Farkhunda had just finished her degree in religious studies and had accepted a teaching position at the Shah-Do Shamshira Mosque. When she chastised a Mullah for selling charms to widows and the poor he loudly accused her of burning the Quran. She responded, “I am a Muslim, and Muslims do not burn the Quran!”

The title of the painting occurred to me when I first viewed the video of Farkhunda’s death on CNN. First, an actor posing as an affluent westerner drives a luxury automobile, the “Drink Coca-Cola” moment. Next, Farkhunda is beaten and burned to the horrified commentary of anchors and correspondents. Finally, to make sure I have not forgotten my role as a consumer, the same actor drives the same luxury automobile.

Mixed media on recycled canvas
76cm X 122cm (30″ X 48″)

One side begins, We believe so strongly in an idea or concept we are willing to kill humans for it. The other side replies, This idea is so toxic we must sacrifice human lives to defeat it.

On March 21, 2003 Marine Lance Cpl. Jose Gutierrez, the first serviceman to die in Operation Iraqi Freedom, was killed in a firefight near Umm Qasr Iraq. An orphan and native of Guatemala, Gutierrez came to the U.S. illegally and was granted citizenship postmortem.

The biblical story of The Binding of Isaac, where Abraham is commanded by Yahweh to sacrifice his son Isaac, was taught to me as a child to illustrate Abraham’s devotion to the Semitic god. Christians take it further believing Yahweh wanted Abraham to comprehend the future sacrifice Yahweh would make of his own son, Jesus. For the mythical Abraham and Sarah it was only a test. For the fathers and mothers of the 4,491 dead soldiers and one million Iraqi civilians it was not.

The concept of sacrifice is found deep in human DNA and replete through history. Some scholars believe the original myth ended in the sacrifice of Isaac but was censored later by way of Deus ex machina with the intervention of an angel and substitution of a ram. Child sacrifice was common in that epoch just as human sacrifice is in our time.

One side begins, We believe so strongly in an idea or concept, we are willing to kill humans for it. The other side replies, This idea is so toxic we must sacrifice human lives to defeat it.

Mixed media on plywood
109cm X 212cm (43″ X 83.5″)

From left to right:  St. Kendrick Johnson, St. Lee Weathersby III, St. Lamar Broussard, St. Emmett Till, St. George Stinney, St. Darrien Nathaniel Hunt, Our Lord James Chaney, St. Renisha McBride, St. Trayvon Martin, St. Victor Steen, St. Tamir Rice, St. Milton Hall and St. James Craig Anderson.

Inspired by CNN contributor LZ Granderson’s How many unarmed people have to die? Last Supper is a remix of the famous da Vinci work.

Martyrs deaths occurred as follows: St. Hunt, a Utah boy with a decorative samurai sword who happened to be brown, St. Hall, a former civil rights leader, and St. Rice, a twelve year old with a BB gun, were gunned down by cops. St. Steen, a teen on a bicycle, was tased by an officer in a squad car and run over. St. Weathersby III and St. Broussard, brothers who were so close they slept in the same bed, were gunned down on the streets of Oakland within three weeks of one another. St. Stinney, fourteen, was executed by electric chair with no evidence for the murder of two young girls, so small he had to use his own bible as a booster seat. St. McBride, a nineteen year old girl, was murdered with a shotgun on a porch by a bad Samaritan as she begged for help after a car accident. St. Martin was shot by neighborhood watch while returning home to his father’s place from a convenient store with skittles. St. Till and St. Chaney were, in separate incidents, kidnapped tortured and executed with sheriffs present in Mississippi; St. Till for allegedly whistling at a white woman, and St. Chaney for his civil rights activism. St. Anderson was beaten by white kids who wanted to go fuck with some *******, the coup de grace inflicted with truck tires. He was also gay. In Mississippi. St. Johnson died by blunt force trauma to the head by unknown assailants in a high school gym, his body stuffed into a rolled up gym mat and his death officially listed as suffocation.

Mixed media on wood
104cm X 75cm (41″ X 29″)

It’s about a guy who falls off a skyscraper. On his way past each floor he keeps telling himself,
So far so good…
So far so good…
So far so good…

La Haine

King David is the Old Testament fusion of Alexander the Great and Jim Morrison, warrior and poet. As a child his aplomb against the giant Goliath left me breathless, armed with only five smooth stones and a sling. Boy could talk some trash, too.

Caravaggio’s David with the head of Goliath horrified me as a child. Now I know the subject of the head of Goliath was Caravaggio’s own face, painted with particular malice.

When I first viewed Claude Vignon’s David with the Head of Goliath at the Blanton Museum I was struck by the effeminate disinterest of his version of David. Surely, a clever musician who just happened to be very skilled with the sling.

Later, when I viewed the pic of Khaled Sharrouf’s young son holding the head of a Syrian soldier in Raqqa Syria, the romance of the myth was destroyed in an instant.

Included in Jusqu’ici Tout Va Bien are Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaer and Eyal Yifrah, three Israeli teenagers kidnapped and murdered on June 12, 2014, as well as Mohamed Abu Khdeir, the Palestinian boy who was burned alive in retaliation. Images of the Holocaust are mingled with the images of the Israel-Gaza conflict.

The title, Jusqu’ici Tout Va Bien (so far, so good), was taken from the film La Haine (Hate) and seemed the perfect mantra for every violent escalation in a never ending conflict.

Mixed media on plywood
200cm X 91.44cm (78.75” X 36”)

To inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them.
Edward Snowden

On May 20, 2013 NSA contractor Edward Snowden flew from Hawaii to Hong Kong to release classified NSA documents to two journalists “to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them.”

His passport was revoked on July 22 leaving him stateless. Snowden applied for asylum in twenty-one countries and in a bizarre twist for a man concerned with global surveillance and information privacy he was granted temporary asylum in Russia, a country that monitors all communication without warrant.

Cast of characters: Edward Snowden, Vladimir Putin, Leonid Brezhnev, the neck and necktie of Ronald Reagan, JFK covered in Russian pixação, Obama and drones, Hillary Clinton and oral spear, Anthony Weiner and wiener, John McCain, Ron Paul, John Boehner…pointing, alien spacecraft neutralizing nuclear mushroom clouds, baby Jesus and Pussy Riot.

Mixed media on wood
74.93cm X 118.11cm (29.5” X 46.5”)

Genghis Khan was the George Washington of Mongolia. Alexander the Great was Attila the Hun to Persians. Columbus is Hitler to Dominicans. And Truman, the Anti-Christ to the denizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

After Osama bin Laden was killed I read an apocryphal piece of journalism on his life in the Pakistani compound. It claimed he had been an avid gardener and wore a sombrero outdoors to hide from the peering eyes of drones and spy planes. The piece also claimed he had tomato-growing contests with his grandkids. When I Googled it later I got nothing but pot plants and opium.

As a small child my grandfather’s past was incidental to me or at the least, unknown. I knew he’d been a boxer in the army in Hawaii. The tattoos on his arms illustrated he’d lived a life different from my parents. What if I discovered he had committed atrocities in a foreign lands?

Later, when I discovered two interviews published by Al Jazeera and the Pakistani newspaper Ummat Karachi where bin Laden denied involvement in the planning and execution of 9/11, as well as the findings of BYU physicist Steven E. Jones and nine other authors published in the peer-reviewed Open Chemical Physics Journal on the presence of nano-thermitic materials in 911 dust, I began to see bin Laden as a fall guy.

My grandfather had also been maligned -for his lack of religiosity, his drinking, his smoking and even the accusations of infidelity in his youth.

For me, he was only grandpa, a god who grew tomatoes in summer.