The concept behind Sites of Integration Series is so integral to American culture. If you are a particular age, you can remember the innumerable ways in which Washington D.C. reflected all the changes integration imprinted onto our lives. My work in the Sites of Integration Series speaks to the insularity, joy, pain, and courage needed to enact integration. In many ways, Washingtonians became the national template for how communities might work toward a vision of integration in the midst of segregation. Our parents worked and raised us during a tumultuous era of change that awakened and challenged our concepts of boundaries that segregation held embedded in social practice. My Petworth neighborhood was an immensely rich landscape where we situated ourselves to cross the boundaries of institutions like Howard Johnsons, city bus lines, educational venues, and local churches. This series of paintings has enabled me to look at the inertia of energies that precipitate acts of integration. When examining contemporary culture, there are a plethora of social landscapes that represent a range from openness to total absolute resistance when the intersection of gender, race, and social class occur. In my rural community, Sites of Integration Series can both surprise and provide fertile ground for optimism. This particular graphite giclee recalls the warm welcoming of a Muslim child into a small cafe in Frederick county in recent years. A county once embargoing some of the largest slave holding plantations in Maryland, integration can take on significant form and autonomous substance in this 21st-century community. My other paintings have looked at the innocence of children caught in the politics of busing.