MY FAMILY has documented our ancestry going back some four hundred years on my mother’s side and nearly three hundred years on my father’s side. I am developing new creative work in Washington DC that mines my family’s (sometimes infamous) original Americans and considers our stolen/erased Indigeneities in relation to the ongoing love story that is the world’s oldest constitutional democracy and the Republic for which it stands.
Always seeking media collaborators. Ongoing —
TEASER IMAGES:
Shakespeare’s beloved wife, muse, and largely presumed ghost writer, Anne Hathaway, once considered my oldest known ancestor. The Hathaways are well documented in the United Kingdom and my father’s side can be traced to at least the 1100s — and yet, my family has always only been concerned with being American. I was told to never mention Hathaway to anyone, so I never did. ‘til now. (Yes, there is a slight resemblance. Image: American graduate student who never once mentioned Hathaway for naught, Goldsmiths College, Canary Wharf in the distance, South East London, 2004. Photo: Aaron Stienstra)
The Madonna of the Trail (Bethesda, MD) is one of twelve monuments across the country dedicated to the likes of women such as Elizabeth Frock, one of my earliest American matriarchs, an original pioneer of the Cumberland Trail and founder of the State of Maryland. I decorated the Madonna in support of Wes Moore’s historic election as the first African American Governor of the State of Maryland. (Election Day, November 2022.)
Chicago legend Albert C. Ellithrope, my great-great-great grandfather, was hired by Abraham Lincoln to organize the first multi-racial Union front on the trans-Mississippi frontier. His Civil War journal chronicles the story of how the West was won and is, quite literally, a foundational example of early American journal-ism. He later invented the elevator brake system still in universal use.
My great-great uncle Morris Frock is commemorated by the more than one hundred year old Morris Frock American Legion Post. No 42 in Hagerstown, MD. He was an essential messenger in WWI, an original Iron Mike, among the first of the Devil Dogs. It has always been a source of pride in my family that he was also an original anti-fascist and a pacifist who refused to carry a weapon. He is buried at the Château-Thierry battlefield and was awarded the Croix de Guerre by the French Republic.
My distant cousin Sam Frock pitched and won the 1909 World Series for the Pittsburgh Pirates — he is buried in Baltimore, MD. My grandfather was also Sam Frock —