Sister Mom
This piece depicts how poverty takes away children’s innocence. This little girl can’t be older than ten years old, but she looks thirty. She’s holding her little sister like a Mom. She’s so young, but has aged exponentially due to the weight of poverty.
To create this work I spent time researching poverty, specifically child poverty. I wanted to understand the emotions poverty causes so that the colors of my art would match the emotions they were meant to depict. I looked through many images until I stumbled upon the little girl holding the baby. She spoke to me. I hoped that the realness of the image would wake people up to the seriousness of childhood poverty and help them to become an active part of the solution.
I think the hardest part of making this was making sure that my print’s weren’t too saturated. Making art at home is very difficult. I had to find my focus, without the usual restraints that lay in a classroom. My passion for this project became my focus. I wanted viewers to think about the person behind the art. 14.4 percent of all children under the age of 18 in the United States are living below the official poverty measure, nearly 11.9 million children. This has been elevated by the pandemic. There has to be change. There’s a story behind every picture.
