Patricia Diart is a visual artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area, who has decided to travel the country, telling the story of her incredibly difficult childhood in the form of a long-draping cape, onto which she hand-stitched her message. The cape details the physical and sexual abuse that her father put her and her family through. Generally, she chooses to wear it, while silently kneeling outside of police departments, places of significance in the fight for social justice and civil rights, as well as inside art museums whether she has prior permission or not. She writes about her experiences from every event she does from a personal and documentary perspective, carefully noticing nuances and the way police and the public react to the content of her cape and presence. Her project melds performance art, activism, social justice consciousness and psychology into deep layers of complexity, only completely understood by someone who experienced her trauma. Patricia summarized her project and history below.
“It was the murder of George Floyd that ignited my project. Sadly, witnessing Chauvin’s contempt as he knelt on Floyd’s neck reminded me of my dad. My cape is stitched with a letter to my father who was a white police officer in Baltimore. He had committed violent acts against our family and he was racist. If art has an agenda, then it is mere propaganda which is more or less a one-liner. The complexity and interconnectedness between all of us is vastly much more complicated and interwoven than a slogan. My cape reveals hard truths that our society would rather shove under a rug. Allowing my letter to be seen in the public sphere gives viewers permission to question their own hidden burdens as it relates to racism and racial justice, domestic violence, sexual assault and child abuse. The best art serves no purpose, the best activism brings significant change. The best I can do is reveal my cape with this in mind. If you don’t own your wounds, they end up owning you.”
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