One Work: Rosalie Smith’s “My Mother’s Last Garden”

“The piece is an aberration in context, on view as part of the exhibition “Make America What America Must Become,” in which Southern artists pan our capitalist, carceral, colonial hell state. Nearly every piece addresses the United States’ most egregious policy failures: environmental racism, the human rights crisis at the southern border, the prison-industrial complex, and the brutality of the American healthcare system. The show’s title, which references a quote from James Baldwin, echoes that awful presidential campaign slogan—nostalgic for the violence of our nation’s past, while striving toward a profoundly inequitable vision of what makes America great.”