Waiting

Somewhere between a newspaper archive and a prayer, Kathryn Cirincione assembled this image at her Bolinas studio — absorbing the news, pulling from collected scraps, letting the plates and the press lead her where they needed to go. The American flag fills the frame like a stage set, its red stripes bleeding into the paper's warm ivory, and on that stage she has placed the fragments of a nation in conflict with itself: a headline celebrating the signing of the Civil Rights Act, a photograph of LBJ at the moment of signature, a sign ordering Black Americans to a separate waiting room, a procession of marching figures, a crowd of onlookers, and, watching from the left edge, a robed woman whose downcast eyes carry the weight of centuries of church painting — Cirincione's Southern Italian inheritance made quietly, powerfully present. On the right, the Statue of Liberty appears half-formed, fragmented, as if she too is still becoming. These are not images that agree with one another. They argue, they accuse, they mourn, and then they offer a thread of hope in the small silhouetted figures — children? marchers? — holding hands across a wide open landscape. That is the gift of Cirincione's method: she leaves the door open for you to walk through and find your own reading. Made as a three-color solar etching printed in a limited edition of ten, this work carries the intimacy of the hand-pulled print and the urgency of a front page. It is at once a document, a memorial, and a question still waiting for its answer.