Painting and Drawing

Gallery under construction

In Foreigner in a Foreign Land, a European starling perches on a Tree of Heaven, contending with a hot pink wrought iron fence. The starling and the tree are two species that, like so many people, crossed oceans in search of survival, only to be deemed invasive. From this solitary bird’s call forms a murmuration of her flock, echoing the Judgement card from the Rider-Waite tarot deck. She, like the archangel Gabriel, trumpets the call for collective awakening.

The starling and the tree embody contradiction. Introduced by European settlers who longed for the familiar birds of Shakespeare’s England, it mirrors the story of colonization itself: both colonizer and colonized. It carries the vulnerability of migration and the arrogance of forgetting where one came from. Like the Tree of Heaven, it thrives in neglected spaces, creating beauty in what is overlooked.

Foreigner in a Foreign Land asks how a nation built by immigrants can so easily forget its origins and how those once considered “foreign” now turn that judgment outward. The wrought iron fence transforms a barrier into something strange and luminous; it’s inviting yet exclusionary. This painting is born out of a single question: can redemption occur if we cannot recognize ourselves?

Made for the RAÍCES | ROOTS Creative Neighbors Program with the Punto Urban Art Museum. Presented at the Peabody Essex Museum.

2019 and before