Rising Up (2021) 
SHOSHANNA WEINBERGER

Rising Up (2021) by Shoshanna Weinberger confronts our social and political histories in the exclusion of otherness and marginalized. 

At the mural’s base are four large stacked squares representing building blocks or earth. Each square is painted in either a horizontal or vertical striped pattern with a specific number of stripes for representing measured time and history: 24 hours; 7 days, 12 months and 13 original colonies. Employing black and white stripe patterns become identifiers that create a visual language and coding. The natural binary of black and white also signifies the societal lines of divisions (i.e. race, economic, class and political) created within civilization. These stripes also act as universal metaphors for hybridity, incarceration, fences, animals, borders, flags and barcodes.  

At the top, like a crown, are braided coils of hair representing our collective consciousness. They appear to be growing out of, and rising above to take their place upon the striped building blocks. The hair, wrapped in gold chain links, alludes to the ongoing history of struggle, and the need for change, not only within the communities of Newark but also across America and beyond.

Rising Up was completed in September of 2021. 

About the Artist:
Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Shoshanna Weinberger received her MFA from Yale School of Art in 2003 and BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995.

Living and working in Newark, NJ, since 2006, Weinberger’s work references her Caribbean-American background, which explores the complexity of heritage and the psychology of peripheral identity. She considers herself a visual anthropologist, cataloguing and surveying these experiences that ultimately question notions of assumed beauty norms and identity through ongoing serial works that result in abstract paintings, drawings, collage, mixed media, and sculptural installations. Learn more about the artist HERE.

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