Rewilded Dollars, Viriditas Series
2024-ongoing
The design of US legal tender has been altered several times over the past century. With each redesign, classical plant motif has been eliminated in favor of increased rectilinear form, blank space, and larger presidential heads. Foliage lost to graphic ecocide.
This emerging body of work imagines the opposite trend: the dollar as pictorial garden of lush olive and acanthus teeming over political figures, state buildings and slogans, now buried in non-fungible verdant abundance.
This project is in progress and will contain several components, including a book, a paper/ceramic/plant installation, and a video. The book will feature interviews with leaders in reparations and land back initiatives, with the support of the Leeway Foundation Art + Change grant. The book will be published in 2027 with Seaton Street Press.
“...questioning the inherent nature of currency (e.g., the dollar as an invention) inspires an ethos of “rewilding”—both of currency and our mental frameworks for understanding what a more humane and repair-based future may look like.”