• This website includes dozens of videos, hundreds of essays, and thousands of drawings created over the past twenty years. Search to learn more about the history of buildings, places, prisons, Newark, New York City, and my PhD research on spatial inequality.

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Newark’s Hidden River

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It is ironic that Newark should ignore the very river it was founded on, the Passaic River. It was the pristine wooded river our city’s founding fathers first saw in 1666. It was our city’s artery to the sea and our industries’ source of wealth. It was the throbbing, flowing heart of our city.
After the automobile drove people to the suburbs and globalization exported jobs abroad, the Passaic was no longer a water highway. It is now this industrial town’s polluted heart. The corporate towers of Newark’s “Renaissance” meet industrial history at the riverbank. The murky waters contain secrets of illegal dumping and toxic pollution that will remain buried for eternity, leaking their oils and toxins down stream. The industrial past clings on, refusing to vanish in forgotten waters. The river of change, the Passaic River, is a place of shifting contrasts, where past meets present.
The river flows on.
View this artwork as part of a short film titled Pictures of Newark

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Artwork reflecting on the theme of surreal outer space

When I gaze at the night sky, I wonder: “What does that infinite darkness contain?” I imagine a plethora of other worlds. I see worlds where gravity and inertia vanish. It is a world of my own fabrication, superimposed over the pitch black sky. While I cannot visit such a place, I can still put image to paper.

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Chirico

Inspired by the Tower of Babel and the Place Vendôme in Paris

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Panoramic artwork of the New York City skyline

When I gaze across the Hudson River from New Jersey, the soaring towers, glassy behemoths, and dark canyons of Manhattan instill me with awe. The broad expanse of the city juts out of the water with crenelated and jagged skyscrapers as if proclaiming: “I am here to stay. Come sun, wind, or water, I will remain. I will grow.”

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 New York CityManhattan from Hoboken

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IMG_6256Misty Manhattan Morning

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Madison SquareMadison Square Park

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George Washington BridgeGeorge Washington Bridge from Riverside State Park

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George Washington Bridge PanoramicGeorge Washington Bridge from Riverside State Park

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New York HarborManhattan from Brooklyn Heights

Cathedral of Saint John the Divine

View more artwork like this about my experiences walking in New York City.
Also featured in the Columbia Daily Spectator in September 2016

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The Cathedral of Saint John the Divine soars above the low-slung tenements and boxy towers that edge up against it. Unfinished it survives; funds have long since dried up in our era of secularism and consumerism. Yet powerful it stands; solid stone will outlive the concrete and glass city. The cathedral’s soaring jagged silhouette seems to proclaim against the soot that darkens its façade and the urban din that drowns out the sanctity of silence: Come weather, wind, or rain, I will stand.

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