Series of data-driven abstract art about people who are too often forgotten.
Think of the largest area of this painting as the almost 8,035 veterans who die from suicide each year. That is 12 times the combined number who died each year in the wars in Iraq (513, the thick line at bottom) and Afghanistan (171, the thin line at bottom). That is about 22 per day.
If you spend about an hour thinking about this, in that time another veteran will have died from suicide.
A veteran is more than twice as likely to die from suicide than a member of the general population.
This is a painting about people who were shot and killed, and too often forgotten.
Think of the entire area of this painting as a year's worth of people killed by guns in the US. The smallish yellowish area, about a third of the painting toward the bottom, are the people killed in gun homicides, including the mass shootings, terrorist attacks and police shootings that seem to dominate our conversations. The thin yellowish line at the bottom is roughly the number of people killed by accident with a gun. All of these are tragedies.
But the largest area at the top, about 2/3s of the painting, is the roughly 2/3s of all gun deaths which are suicides. If we truly believe that "All Lives Matter," we would probably spend twice as much time talking about gun suicides as we do homicides.
If you spend just 25 minutes looking at this painting and thinking about this today, in that time someone in the US will have shot and killed themselves.
This is a painting about people who are victims of rape and sexual assault who are too often forgotten.
Think of the entire area of this painting as every rape and sexual assault committed in America in a single year.
That small, thin blue/green line at the bottom -- only roughly a tiny .6% of this painting -- those are the only attacks where the perpetrator is ultimately sent to jail.
Those are some incredibly small odds. And sometimes, after a victim somehow beats those odds, that rapist is only sent to jail for 6 months for raping an unconscious woman if the rapist is on the swim team at Stanford.
On average, there are 288,820 victims (age 12 or older) of rape and sexual assault every year in the United States.
If you spend just 2 minutes looking at this painting and thinking about this today, in that time another person will be raped or sexually assaulted in America.
This is a painting about people of the Muslim faith who are too often forgotten.
Think of the entire area of this painting as the last 13 years. The large yellow/green area at the bottom, over half of the painting, that's the 7 of the last 13 years when a Nobel Peace Prize was given to a person of the Muslim faith.
These are people we should be talking more about.
Notice that the colors of paint that I've used for the Muslims and non-Muslims in this painting, yellow/green and blue/green? They're really not that different from each other.
These are those Nobel Peace Prize winners: Shirin Ebadi of Iran (2003), Mohamed ElBaradei of Egypt (2005), Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh (2006), Tawakkol Karman of Yemen (2011), Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan (2014), and the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet (2015).