This piece does not shout—but it sings, in low and haunted tones.
A woman bends gently in the middle distance, harvesting cotton or flowers beneath a canopy of green. Her gesture is quiet, her figure almost translucent, cut out of a vintage oil painting now sliced into a new form—a portal. Her hands, though painted decades ago, feel immediate. She is laboring not in nostalgia, but in history. Not background, but origin.
Encircled by a mirrored ring, the scene reflects not only light but conscience. The viewer hovers at the edges of the frame—half in the present, half pulled back into a world built on hands like hers. If you are not Indigenous to this land, you arrived through someone like her. Immigrants, refugees, ancestors with calloused palms and names difficult to pronounce, who bent down and built the scaffolding of everything we now call American comfort.
And yet, we forget them. Worse—we punish them. This mirror shows us our own forgetting. The current administration’s treatment of immigrants—detention, dismissal, erasure—is not a break from our past, but a reflection of it. History, like this frame, is circular.
The outer rim—a grand, aged tin frame—echoes the machinery of industry and labor, the bones of factories and forgotten names. It holds everything in place, as memory does.
The Portal We Refuse to See is not merely art. It is an aperture. A slow reckoning. A protest constructed in beauty, daring us to remember who built this country—and to finally see them not as ghosts, but as the foundation.
