Yearning for a past that never was

The exhibition America Unfinished?!, comes to Waterfire Arts Center in Providence this weekend for a run through August 30. These days, “America unhinged” feels like a more apt description. In such times, William Evertson is the printmaker to call on. He’ll have work in America Unfinished?!.

Bill, who shows with Childs Gallery, brings big questions to his practice, criss-crossing through history and finding patterns of oppression and resistance. He follows in a grand tradition of printmakers speaking truth to power (William Hogarth, Francisco Goya, Kathë Kollwitz).

His woodcut prints can be seen all over the place now, and that’s a healthy sign during this very odd 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. In addition to the Waterfire Arts Center, you can find them at the 10th Biennial Footprint International Exhibition at the Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Norwalk, Conn., through August 30; Rooted in Activism at Brickbottom Gallery in Somerville through July 12, and Patchwork: Connecticut Artists Consider 250, at Florence Griswold Museum in Lyme, Conn., through Nov. 8.

Consumed by the Never Was, which he writes about below, is on view in Patchwork. In it, Bill takes on media’s role in shaping American longings, memories, and national identity. The print is a terrifying image of a family surrounded by a fortress of old, boxy television sets, grinning at the messages coming through the screens: A cowboy on a rearing horse, a gleeful housewife cleaning dishes, the Father Knows Best family, and… see that TV in the lower left? Those are the dudes chanting “Jews shall not replace us” at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017.

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Americans. We are noble and good. We are also shadowy and vicious. This has always been true. The storied greatness MAGA is trying to recapture never existed. It’s an illusion in potent packaging.

“What I learned, somewhere in the middle of the carving, is that the nostalgia is not really about the past at all,” Bill writes below. “It is about control over the present.”

Most of us are narcotized and even repurposed by the media we consume. As more and more facts dissolve from the center of the narrative, media gains control over us because we have nothing to agree on. This is where artists like Bill come in, with a breadth of questions and a willingness to hold difficult feelings and ideas in one hand. It’s a contrast to the flat, gilded messaging that comes from the White House about so-called greatness.

In his unflinching woodcuts, Bill says “look at the bigger picture. The light and the shadow. The ways we stand up. The ways we cave in to fear and greed. Just look.” Maybe if we do, we can begin to awaken.

Bill writes: