Based on talk about rigged elections, voter fraud and voter suppression, I decided to record our voting experience for the presidential election in 2020 and the Senate runoff in January of 2021 from beginning to end. We have voted “in person” for over 40 years but because of the pandemic and my then ongoing health issues, we decided to vote by absentee ballot. We are both over 65 and felt that it was the right and safe thing to do.
We received an inordinate amount of unsolicited correspondence related to voting absentee; first from the Center for Voter Information and then from the Secretary of State's office. To be precise, we each received 10 copies of the same letter from Lionel Dripps with a general explanation of voting absentee. We also received 4 copies each of the Application for Official Absentee Ballot after we filled it out and mailed it. In other words, together we received a total of 20 letters from Lionel Dripps and 10 Applications for Official Absentee Ballots, some of which arrived after the Presidential election and the Senate runoff occurred.
Receiving so many applications created a great deal of confusion for us. We called the Secretary of State's office several times to make sure they had, in fact, received our applications. From the day we were assured that they had received the applications and that our Absentee Ballots had been mailed to us, we waited 13 days for the actual ballots to arrive. We filled them out immediately and personally delivered them to a Deposit Box at the Auburn Street Library. We waited a few days and then checked online to make sure that our votes had been accepted.
We went through the same exact machinations for the Senate Runoff on January 5th.
This system was very confusing. Why so many letters? Why so many Applications for Absentee Ballots? Because we received so many ballot applications we were concerned that none of them had been received by The Georgia Secretary of State’s Office. We called FairFight to help us because we had so little faith that voting absentee was working properly for us.
It all worked out in the end but it was an angst ridden experience for no obvious reason.
The Artist as a Child or the Child as a Prescient Artist...
I was probably 5 years old when I drew this picture. There is no telling what was going on in my mind then but what’s strange about it is that it predicted some aspects of my life with a naive yet uncanny accuracy.
There are three figures in the foreground: my father, my mother and I. My Dad is walking in one direction on a path that is different than my mother’s and mine. My mother is standing behind me as I run along the road that leads to a steep incline and then, beyond the crest of the hill, to a bride approaching a groom. His head is the only one that has been erased and drawn twice, suggesting a second marriage(?) His foot is at the entrance to a garden, with a tree, grass and flowers; a paradise of sorts that is self contained and isolated from everything else. A solitary blue bird flies overhead, the sun shines brightly in a blue sky and, in the background, stands a mountain colored in black.
My Dad’s path originated in the shadow cast by the house and ends abruptly. He died suddenly at the age of 59, and my mother married a second time several years later. I also married twice. Our time without my father far outlasted our time with him. In the meantime, I worked several different jobs, lived in various places, had medical issues, perhaps the many paths, some that disappear over the hill and some more tortuous than others.
And the black mountain? It took me quite a while to understand its significance because it is rendered, oddly enough, without a hint of danger or menace. The only interpretation that makes sense to me is almost too simple. For many years my mother traveled extensively around the world and to her home country but when she reached her 80’s, she reduced her travels to summers in… Black Mountain, NC.
Request From A Favorite...
The LaGrange Art Museum has requested I make my collage, ”Accept This,” available for use in their Call For Entries mailer. I’m honored and pleased to do so. The LaGrange Art Museum, in particular Lanora Yates, Gallery Director & Curator of The Lamar Dodd Arts Center has been very appreciative of my work in the past and this is a nice gesture by the museum. This museum is a wonderful regional art center, certainly top tier in the southeast. I’m happy to spread the word.
Chronicle Of An Immigrant: My Father's Story
August 21, 2015
What I found out about my father’s childhood both surprised me and inspired me to make this collage. His relationship with his older sister and his mother always struck me as strained but he died before I could ask him about it.
A few years ago, on a trip to visit family in Italy, a cousin gave me a handful of letters written to my father, Dante by his father, Francesco. The letters had been in the attic at least 70 years and were discovered while cleaning out the attic to prepare the house for its new owners. Unfortunately the letters my Dad wrote in response were lost.
So, I was able to piece together this much:
My grandparents Francesco and Adelia emigrated to the United States and took their first born, Maria with them but left their son, Dante, my father, in the care of Francesco’s sister, Isolina, and her husband. I had known of this vaguely but learned from the letters that my father had been left in the care of his aunt & uncle… for 10 years(!) During this time, Francesco wrote lovingly about America in beautiful penmanship telling Dante to study English. America, he wrote, would give him a better life than a poor country like Italy. As far as I can tell, Dante did not want to come to the United States and Francesco and Adelia never came back to Italy to visit their son. He came to the US as a teenager, his parents and his sister were strangers to him and shortly thereafter he went back to Italy to stay with the only family he had ever really known, his aunt & uncle and their two daughters, Lucia and Giovanna.
However, when Mussolini rose to power, Francesco became concerned for my father's safety and feared his certain conscription. According to a letter written by my dad in August of 1944, Francesco arranged for him to travel to Marseilles where the Nieri family helped him to board the Saturnia, bound for the United States.
Lucia lived in her parents’ home until she was in her eighties, which is why the letters were not discovered until a few years ago. I will never know why so much time lapsed before my father was reunited with his sister and their parents other than his initial desire to return to the more familiar.
My grandfather died of pneumonia at 57 years of age on Christmas Day, 1945 in New York City, shortly after my parents were married. My grandmother Adelia died in the early 70’s. As a child, I never witnessed any affection between mother and son.
My father, the only member of his family to graduate from college, became a successful businessman and died at the age of 59 in 1975. At his death he was only two years older than his father.
I finished this collage within days of the 40th anniversary of my father’s passing, August 21, 2015. It’s an homage, divided in three parts, with the colors of the Italian flag as a backdrop. On the left panel is a photo of my Dad as a young boy with his friends, the middle panel, my Dad at 23 years of age, on the ship Saturnia bound for the US and the right panel, a photo of him split in half, as a young man in NYC.