The United States of Grief reframes national identity through collective mourning. A faceless figure emerges against the American flag, where stars are replaced by hollow symbols and crosses multiply across the field. The erased features resist individual identification, suggesting how grief is absorbed, anonymized, and normalized at a national scale. By collapsing portraiture into emblem, the work questions how loss becomes patriotic spectacle—honored in symbol while emptied of accountability. The painting asks what remains when grief is institutionalized, and whose deaths are permitted to fade into abstraction.

Medium

Acrylic and oil pastel on canvas, diptych

Size

10 × 10 in (25.4 × 25.4 cm) each

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