Gabe’s Artist Statement:

In my drawing, I am trying to represent what life would be like if we all had worked together instead of segregated. I did this by trying to make Theophilus and Penelope seem more modern. I know that we would not have advanced that fast, but the point is that we would be much better together. If enslaved humans didn’t have to jump over all of the hurdles thrown at them, they would have helped advance society even more than they did with all the hurdles. I tried to make them look how people would look if they were making a Christmas card or something similar.

In my original drawing, I was going to make a lighting bolt going through the page with one side segregation and the other side modern, but I didn’t want to make it negative; this drawing is about what America could have been, not what America has become. We could have been learning about how everybody got along and worked together to make us better. But because the African Americans were new and the white men needed free labor, we are now learning about how black people did not get the same opportunities that the white people were getting. About how “free” black men and women were killed for walking in the wrong place, free people getting arrested for not having permission to exist on a specific street. With this drawing, I wanted to make it clear that we, America, would have been much, much better.