Reflecting on this, she felt our nation was deeply defined by white fragility, ever walking on eggshells. In the headlines and in her daily life, she could feel the mounting tension as we took the measure of WEB Dubois’ veil. Old defense mechanisms were crumbling – and this was before the spectacular uprisings of 2020!

The eggs connote promise, protection and new birth, sustenance, strength and delicateness all at once. The gauze invokes notions of wounded-ness and healing, fragility and obscured vision. Cotton alludes to American slavery in its various forms from chattel to sharecropping to forced labor via incarceration.

About this time, artist Mia Risberg presented her beautiful paintings addressing the racist practice of red-lining. As Laura considered red-lining in banking, real estate and more, it occurred to her that the boundary of division was so much more than red lines on fading maps, historical practices of enduring unfairness, more than an external phenomenon. It’s an internal one. The red line resides within us. We redraw it constantly in our thought lives, in our interactions with people. It lives within us wherever we go.

Building on this idea, Social Codes V features a crisp red linear element as an internal spinal column enveloped in energetic filters of belief, expressions of language, ideals and coded interactions. Social Codes VI bridges the external divide which red-lining has manifested.

“I had always thought of Eurocentric culture as intrinsically desirable, but have learned that for many it remains a relentless oppression.”

Thinking about how we all propagate cultural forces, Laura developed a series of paintings as benchmarks of points of personal insight throughout the discussions.

Propagate I speaks to her initial naiveté. It is sugary, with floral depth + a sense of inviting, whereas Propagate II layers strata of greed and violence – a base of faux metals, colors of skin and blood in a tight space of confinement. Propagate III reflects the depth of grief, disgust and despair the artist experienced when confronting the ugliness of whiteness. In Propagate IV a white steel cage surrounds the painting. The piece addresses how cultural meanings exist both as illusion and physical manifestation in the world.

Gallery-goers were invited for a slice of pie at the diner – a space flanked by parenthetic walls displaying 400 white bakery boxes, one for every year since slavery was introduced in what became the United States, and chairs encircling a vintage bicentennial table with liberty symbols in front of an American flag that had been primed white. Each guest was given a piece of pie, and instructed to lift the upper crust to see what they had been served.

Five out of six slices assigned a racial disparity: healthcare, education, justice, poverty or peoplehood. Just one granted the benefits of white privilege. Guests were left to discuss what they'd been served. At the conclusion, each person received a pie "to go", a brochure outlining 10 reparation points as well as the descriptions on the racial disparity pie slices.