Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History
2025-
Graphite & charcoal drawings on paper, website, search engine intervention
Variable dimensions
In March 2025, the Trump administration issued Executive Order (EO) 14253 “Restoring Truth And Sanity To American History” which targets and censors American art and erases established American histories. I subsequently purchased the domain name www.restoringtruthandsanitytoamericanhistory.com. A website with this domain name now hosts a collection of intricate drawings that depict the images and histories that the administration is aiming to erase in a project also titled Restoring Truth And Sanity To American History.
Restoring Truth And Sanity To American History is an interdisciplinary art project that uses graphite & charcoal drawings to make copies of historical and contemporary source imagery that the EO is targeting. The drawings are scanned and uploaded to the www.restoringtruthandsanitytoamericanhistory.com website where they become an archive and are discoverable within web search engines like Google Images. This process explores the cyclical nature of history and images by illuminating the concept of historical recurrence.
The Restoring Truth And Sanity To American History project reclaims these targeted histories from the administration’s revisionist assault by literally drawing from history to amplify and reveal the truth about the erasures that are happening before our eyes.
A few examples of the targeted images and histories are “The Scourged Back”, an infamous image from 1863 of an escaped enslaved man named Peter that was flagged for removal from educational displays about the history slavery at Fort Pulaski National Monument in Savannah, GA; the removal of World War II displays that honored Black soldiers from a US military cemetery in the Netherlands; and, the re-installment of the Confederate General Albert Pike Memorial in Washington, DC after it was toppled on Juneteenth, 2020.
These are just a few of the incidents resulting from an EO that claims there is “a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”
Visit project website: www.restoringtruthandsanitytoamericanhistory.com