lapins et renards de la dame et de la licorne 

At the beginning of March 2020, I spent less than two weeks of a scheduled two-month residency at the Cite' Internationale des Arts in Paris, France. Most of that time was taken up with my spouse and I setting up a household, and in the midst of the pandemic, determining how long we would stay there. We joked that we would leave when they started to close the bakeries. We hastily escaped back to the US on March 15, 2020. 

During my brief time there, I barely began this series of drawings based on the rabbit and fox images in the so-called Lady and the Unicorn tapestries that are housed in Paris's Museum of the Middle Ages. Rabbits are the only animals (other than the unicorn) that are present in every one of these tapestries. They appear 34 different times. Rabbits were not kept as pets in the Middle Ages, instead they were wild and hunted by both humans (and foxes). For these drawings, the rabbit is an obvious stand-in for us humans during this pandemic, and the foxes represent the virus. It’s all nature. 

Continuing my exploration of the Unicorn tapestries these black rabbits came about after reading Larry Ward's new book, America's Racial Karma - An Invitation to Heal. A passage from Ward's poem "When I Became Currency" inspired the creation of these black rabbits: "I touch the sun and am touched by the moonlight like all beings." 

A new series based on portions of images in antique German decorative scraps.