POSTCARD VIEWS
Denise Weaver Ross’ work unveils an edgy turn rooted in politics, national tragedies
At first glance, Denise Weaver Ross’ paintings resemble vintage postcards, splashed with some colorful updating.
A closer look reveals an edgy underpinning rooted in politics and controversy.
On view online at Albuquerque’s Ghostwolf Gallery, her “Postcards to America” is just getting started, with images referencing the violence in Ferguson, Missouri, shootings in Florida and the Walmart killings in El Paso.
Ross grew up in Wisconsin in a white, Protestant family that spent their vacations traveling to Disneyland and most of America’s national parks. She married a man from Jamaica and has biracial children.
“I grew up with the postcard view,” Ross said. “On the other hand, I lived in Milwaukee during the riots of the ’60s, so I was very aware of the racial divide. We have a beautiful country and on the other hand, there are things that are disturbing.”
To begin a piece, Ross gathers vintage postcards from across the internet to use as templates. She creates a digital mock-up, adding layers, then prints it, cutting out images and transferring them to paper. She produces bright splashes of color using an oil wax crayon and colored pencil.
Ross feels particularly drawn to the dramatic lettering of the postcards she remembers from her childhood.
“You have the space outside the letters and inside the letters to play with,” she said.
The Ferguson piece reflects the 2014 police shooting of
Michael Brown with a red heart swallowing a stand of armed men.
“Missouri calls itself the heart of America,” Ross said. “So I used ‘The Heartbreak of America’ because of Ferguson.”
Her Florida postcard includes the group of young activists who appeared on the cover of Time magazine in the aftermath of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting. In 2018, a gunman opened fire, killing 17 people and injuring 17 more in Parkland, Florida. Ross added an image of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-yearold African American, who was killed by a neighborhood watchman in 2012.
“They had the ‘stand your ground’ law in that state that got (Martin’s shooter) off, so I called it ‘The Stand Your Ground State.’”
Her Texas piece expresses the horror of the mass Walmart shooting in El Paso in 2019. Twenty-two people died.
Ross named it “The Lone Gunman State.”
“My earliest memory of Texas was when Kennedy was shot,” she said.
The iconic image of the young John F. Kennedy, Jr. saluting his late father’s casket appears next to a sketch of a tower. The image refers to the 1966 University of Texas tower shooting where 14 people died amid what was then the country’s deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman.
These tragedies epitomize the dark side of American rugged individualism, Ross said.
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, inspired her next work-inprogress.
“I’m calling it ‘Genuine American Segregation,’” Ross said. “Milwaukee is the most segregated city in the nation. People don’t realize that.”
She’s still mulling over a New Mexico postcard, guessing it will focus on the state’s fraught nuclear history. She’s also working on a postcard for New York.
“It’s called ‘The Empire State,’’ she said. “I call it ‘The Epicenter State.’ ”