USA TODAY
Selected collages 2017-2021 Paul VanDeCarr
USA TODAY Late on election night in 2016, I rode the subway home from what I had hoped would be a celebration, but the car was full and quiet and the mood was gloomy. In that scene, I saw some of the faces from George Tooker’s arresting 1950 painting, “The Subway,” in which people in various shades of despair and anxiety are stuck in a purgatorial subway station. Over the course of the next year, I made several collages that provide a modern gloss on the painting. They would be the first in a series of collages I would make to express my horror at what would become a renewed yearslong assault on democracy, freedom, and the planet. I came of age as a gay man during the AIDS crisis, which was largely ignored —or worse—by the powers-that-be. That experience left me feeling that my safety and rights were always precarious. I still sense a strong current of violence under the normally polite veneer of American life. This enduring strain of violence was exploited by the previous president for his own personal gain, and the world’s loss. Every time his administration boosted dictators, bashed immigrants, or battered the environment, I thought with pain of the harm done to the people of the world, especially the most powerless and vulnerable. My own experience of vulnerability led me to a career for peace and justice. Since 2015, I’ve worked at the United Nations, where each agonizing day of the previous administration seemed to foreclose any progress on the global catastrophes of war, climate, and pandemic. On the following pages are a few of the collages I made between 2017 and 2021. These collages are not about the former president, but about the larger forces of which he is a part, and the role that each of us must play in continuing or confronting them. They are about the struggle we are in. In the original painting “The Subway,” there is a maze of pillars and gates and corridors. But there is no way out. In the country today, we must make one. Paul VanDeCarr New York City 2022