‘american flag.  tent city, sacramento, ca 2009′

‘proposed design for logo, dispatches from (a)mended america.  text by barack obama‘

my photograph of the american flag taken at tent city, sacramento, california, will be used as the logo for the ‘dispatches from (a)mended america,’ a documentary theatre piece created from nearly 90 interviews conducted in the south in the days leading up to u.s. president barack obama’s inauguration, thus examining and expounding upon the themes race, politics and the journey of the american identity to a destination and frontier yet unknown:

‘In the month leading up to the 2009 Presidential Inauguration, Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr., a 42-year-old black man, and Brandt Adams, a 25-year-old white man, both raised in Virginia, traveled throughout the American Southeast along the routes of the Freedom Riders conducting interviews in an attempt to better understand the significance of the election of America’s first African American President.

The guiding questions were: What does this historic event mean to you? Has it changed your life? Has this changed America? What happens now? We felt we could best investigate these questions by soliciting real Americans’ own stories of the 2008 presidential election through their eyes and in their own words. In doing so, the election became a lens through which we were able to explore questions of race and identity with deep resonances not only for the South, but for the whole country.

The interviews were digitally recorded and are now being crafted into a documentary theatre piece called DISPATCHES FROM (A)MENDED AMERICA.’