Catalog Entry from If These Walls Could Talk Exhibit, Neill-Cochran House 2020:

Fondue pots were all the rage in the 1960s, coming from the Swiss tradition of cheese or chocolate dipping sauce. Here in Texas these old pots with their eternal Sterno flame are often appropriated for queso. I thought of it as the quintessential melting pot, a failed metaphor for diversity in the United States. Merging of cultures is never easy, but history proves it is fertile. We forget that the U.S. was founded with this hope—all of us descend from either immigrants or native peoples. How many other countries welcome all? The melting pot here is uplifted on the dining table, and blended in with the ingredients for Frito Pie (see No. 6). Tex-Mex food is a good metaphor for mestizo and the mixing of cultures, so I turned to it to point out the paradoxes of Hispanic/ Latinx immigration. If you don’t have the authentic Mexican cheese, a brick of Velveeta is a poor substitution, but with the right added ingredients, it’ll do. Turns out that orange loaf is about as good for sculpture as it is for queso, and the block is the perfect scale for a Statue of Liberty. So my Chlora character, concerned about liberty and justice for all, carves her out of the cheese. An old adage says frogs will stay put in a pot of water as it is brought to a boil; they will remain there until it is too late to jump out. Well, scientists have taken the time to disprove this, but here two frogs crawl out. In their rush they are leap-frogging. The frogs are modeled after a pair of Mixtec (ancient Mexican) ceramic frogs that accompany Tlaloc, the god of rain. This enormous set of frogs resides in the Dallas Museum of Art; I know them well. More frog imagery came into play on the lid, where we see a medieval rendition of the Plague of Frogs, one of the tricks Moses used to persuade Pharaoh to let his people go. (see Exodus 8.) And Lady Liberty is having a meltdown.