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

Every hotel guest knows the voyeurism of stepping over somebody else’s room service tray, peeking to see what they ordered--the reasonable continental breakfast or the hearty American fare. Here in the Dallas Arts District is a full menu of gloriously impossible treats, which I have been devouring for three months. A few are commemorated here, with thanks to the Fairmont Hotel for its artist-in-residency program. At times I felt like Alice in Wonderland, dipping in behind the scenes, discovering at least six impossible things before breakfast. This sculpture is based on the actual room service trays the Fairmont used. From their chef, I borrowed fried bacon and waffles with split strawberries to use as models along with the coffee pot, tray, etc. One porter received a reprimand for leaving a used tray on the cart in the lobby. (If management had looked closer, they would have realized that was my sculpture!) The hotel workers had become my good acquaintances behind the scenes, and I felt badly that someone was fooled by my trompe l’oeil. I intended the sculpture to be one of joyful abundance about the arts. Embedded in the Dallas Arts District, I found its offerings up close and personal in amazing ways. For many years previously, I had worked at the Dallas Museum of Arts and knew its collection well. Once again I had daily access to it and to the Nasher Sculpture Center, where a curator let me go into art storage to view the large Giacometti Spoon Woman. All of the other images adapted here come from the DMA, except one, Manet’s Olympia. I’d seen her before in Paris, and she was the star of a recent exhibition featuring the black servant in art. Unlike most forgotten servants, Laure, the model for the servant in the background, was a known model. Just thinking of Tony, Edouardo, Enrique, Aida, Daniel, Curtis, Maggie, Alice… all those who served, I added Olympia and Laure to the tray seven years later.

Newspaper:

This newspaper is part of an ensemble made in 2011 that appears upstairs in the Master Bedroom (see No. 56). Here, nine years later, it has been highlighted to represent the scourge of fake news that we now endure. Moreover, it acknowledges the first African-American newspaper in Austin, published just two blocks north of here. The Gold Dollar was the important source of news for the freedman community. Its publisher was the Rev. Jacob Fontaine, whose historically marked home just a block away on San Gabriel Street is the last building standing (barely) from the Wheatville freedman community. The modest rock and wood structure is a silent rebuke of city permissions that allow us to deface our own history. The paintings on the newspaper are on display at the Dallas Museum of Art. Chlora sees the Arts Section as an emblem of hope… as are the arts in dark times.