Our Time
The series starts here, with the flag flowing in the wind and the sun coming through it from behind. The light burns the color out as it passes: a hot spot at the center where the dye gives up and the cloth goes almost white.
Colored pencil is the right instrument for that — the red goes in like something taken up by fabric rather than laid on it — and drawn slowly enough, the glare stops reading as light and starts reading as temperature. You can nearly feel it on the back of the cloth.
It was made in 2012: the year the Mayan calendar was supposed to run out, the year Obama was handed the country again with the wreckage of the crash still on the books. Eras ended and started all over that year, none of them announcing themselves. The flag keeps flying through it, bleached by the same sun everybody was watching for a sign.
Which is why the title sits in the past tense. Our time is a phrase that only works looking back at something already spent, and nothing promises the next stretch will resemble it. The sun that took the color out of this flag goes on rising over whatever comes after, and it has made no commitments.
Series: Exceptionalism
Collection: The Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, Palm Beach, Florida