There were many activist artist groups in New York City during the 1980s and 1990s. I worked with Art Against Apartheid, Artists' Call Against US Intervention in Central America, Artists for Nuclear Disarmament and Political Art Documentation/Distribution.

 

In the South African People Shall Rise, two body prints based on the image of the Shroud of Turin were combined with two texts: in copper paint, selections from the South African Freedom Charter; in red paint, a variation on an ancient religious maxim (Tertullian).

 

The figure in Disappeared is based upon a statue of the martyr St. Cecilia (the patron saint of music who was silenced by beheading) in the Catacombs of St. Calixtus near Rome. The texts relate three stories taken from newspaper accounts about the deaths of individual women—in San Salvador, Montreal and Lyon (France). Disappeared observes the essential invisibility of women in three cultural settings and under three very different circumstances.