O, AND ABOUT Me GHOSTS —
MY FAMILY has documented our ancestry in the New World going back some four hundred years on both sides. I am developing new creative work in Washington DC that mines my family’s 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. My great grandmother was the last Hathaway. (Yes, there is a slight resemblance. Image: American graduate student , Goldsmiths College, Canary Wharf in the distance, South East London, 2004.)
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. Ellithorpe, my 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 a foundational example of early American journal-ism. Later in life, he 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, among the first of the Devil Dogs. It has always been a source of pride in my family that he was 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 late grandfather was also Sam Frock —