For Now, We Wait
By Jen Graham
I love being at home. I am a nervous, reclusive person. At home, I have control over my environment, and I feel safe. I never get bored, and I rarely want to leave. Thus, staying at home has not been difficult for me. I am, however, terrified of this virus, and now, I’m terrified to leave my house. I am worried about our lack of national leadership, leadership that has turned a health crisis into a political war, and worried about our crumbling democracy. I am worried about the people who are forced to go to work, to face the public daily, people who have become expendable by our society in order to secure the ‘freedom’ of the privileged. I am worried about getting sick. Worried about dying, about members of my family dying. I wouldn’t say that I’m a person one might go to for comfort. But sometimes comfort can be found in shared misery or fear.
When the stay-at-home order was issued in response to the pandemic, I started making fabric lawn signs to share brief messages with anyone who happened to wander by my house. I am a fiber artist, and I primarily make political art. My work is my way, as an anti-social homebody, to speak up, to add to the conversation, and hopefully to contribute to positive change. When I have something to say, I make a new piece. So, safe at home but afraid of the world, I decided to create a kind of postcard to the neighborhood in the form of a lawn sign.
Photos/Jen Graham.
The first sign read For now, we wait. The public was made aware that the virus had started to spread within the United States, and shortly after we were ordered to stay at home. The economy shut down, many of us lost our jobs, and we sat inside our homes in a state of anxious confusion. We didn’t know what was happening or what to do about it. All we could do was wait.
The second sign I made read Art fills the void. Stuck at home, many people turned to art in some form for comfort, inspiration, or entertainment. They watched movies, played video games, toured museums virtually, learned to knit, and so on. And the artists made work, like they always do. Art is always vital to a society, but in a time when many people have lost the things that they find most fulfilling in their lives, they are filling those voids with art.
The next sign read Don’t Panic. Or maybe you should. (the guidance is unclear). The national response to the pandemic in the United States has been a complete disaster. From the very beginning there has been no clear guidance or strong national leadership, and science is often undermined by conspiracy theories and politics. I tell myself not to panic. But I really feel like I should be panicking. But no one else is panicking. Or are they? I don’t know!
My fourth sign read Science is our ally. The only thing that can free us from this nightmare of a pandemic is science. This virus is new, so it should be expected that guidance might change as we learn more about the virus. But the current administration has spent so much time discounting scientific knowledge, that when our understanding of the science changes, it only reinforces the administration’s disinformation campaign to convince us that we can’t trust science. But we cannot save ourselves from this virus. We need science to save us. And we need to understand how scientific discovery works. We need to be flexible and open-minded. We need to trust the experts, even if they are sometimes wrong. Science is not our enemy. We need it as an ally, and we can’t win without it.
Shortly after I made the fourth sign, protests broke out across the nation and around the world in response to George Floyd’s murder at the hands of the police. There are so many things that make me disappointed in the nation that we have become, but these protests make me feel proud of what our nation is capable of. It is incredibly moving to watch so many people stepping out into a pandemic to stand up for what’s right, facing continued police brutality and harassment. These problems of systemic racism and police brutality have been there all along, and there have been many protests and movements over the years to try to draw attention to all of the injustice and inequality that is ingrained into every aspect of American society. But we didn’t listen. This time it really feels like we are actually listening. White people are being confronted with how we contribute to a system that actively suppresses people of color. Finally, we can no longer avoid the problems that our privilege has allowed us to ignore. After weeks of not knowing what to say, I made a sign that read You can’t look away anymore.
The lawn signs are made of fabric or felt appliquéd onto fabric and placed on a wire frame I had left over from a Warren for President lawn sign. I plan to continue making these signs, sending my commentaries out into the world, for as long as I have something that I want to say with them.
Jen Graham is a fiber artist from Reno, Nevada. Embracing the history of the sewing arts as a form of storytelling, recording family history, and protest, she uses traditional embroidery and sewing techniques to both reinvestigate American history and discuss current political and social issues. She has exhibited her work in both solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States, including at the Nevada Museum of Art, the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, and the Muskegon Museum of Art.
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