The Enemy Amongst Us

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    Photo: Stephen Pitkin/Pitkin Studio
1995
Paint, pine straw, metal grate, tin, nails, on wood
50 x 53 inches
Collection of
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation
Description

Despair found meaning through outrage in a series of pieces occasioned by the Oklahoma City bombing of April 1995. Part city skylines and part shantytowns, these pieces shred the myths of the melting pot, the social mosaic, the American Experiment. Oklahoma, Timothy, April Nineteenth (The Number), Awakening, Conspiracy, and The Enemy amongst Us are frayed and tattered improvisational patchwork quilts. Let us remain mindful, as Lockett was, that one of the dark motives for the Oklahoma bombing was white supremacy, that, far from being an act of maniacal desperation, the Oklahoma bombing was an intentional spectacle of terror, as lynchings once were.