Waiting—Erin O’Brien Watching the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court Hearing

“Waiting—Erin O’Brien Watching the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court Hearing” is a 2018 portrait of a Los Angeles-based queer, mixed-race Vietnamese American artist Erin O’Brien. The portrait was originally commissioned by Topic magazine for their Federal Project No. 2- Re-examining America, which asked 50 American artists to look back at projects created during the New Deal and make work that reflects the United States. I selected Japanese immigrant Yasuo Kuniyoshi for inspiration and created 6 portraits for a series called “The Daily News” (named after a 1935 Kuniyoshi painting) that featured female Asian American, gender nonbinary, and transgender artists responding to the current political state of the day.

On the morning of September 26, 2018, I asked six Asian American artists to photograph themselves in response to the biggest news of the day: the Senate hearings for the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who Dr. Christine Blasey Ford had accused of sexual assault when they were both teenagers. The Kavanaugh hearing and Ford’s testimony magnified the #MeToo movement by throwing a spotlight on rape culture in America, as well as on the Trump administration’s endorsement of white patriarchy. For many Asian Americans, it was hard to separate our response to the hearing from the rage we felt about Trump’s racist, anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric. The mask of white nationalism had been unveiled and was taking up so much space in our lives. We were exhausted by the gaslighting and political circus. When the hearing was over and Senate prepared to vote, the activists Ana Maria Archila and Maria Gallagher cornered Senator Jeff Flake while he was in a congressional elevator, on his way to cast his vote in favor of Kavanaugh and told him about their own experiences with sexual assault.

I realized I wanted to create paintings that captured Archila and Gallagher’s raw emotions of empathy, sadness, rage, disgust, revenge, and resolve. I found myself asking, “Who is and isn’t allowed to express anger, and what range of emotions can we publicly display?” I wanted to capture this flashpoint before it dissolved back into apathy, as the next wave of breaking news crashed around us. In the paintings in this series, I explored the power and mobilizing the potential of anger for Asian American womxn to create solidarity, by portraying images of those who are usually silenced and invisible.

In response to their portrait, Erin O’Brien shared, “I feel that it’s important to show the vulnerable crumbly parts of ourselves and knowing the strong parts of ourselves are in the background.”