Towards a Prosthetic Power: Un-False Beard, 2017. Video projection onto a monument to Frances Scott Key, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco.
Onto the plinth of a monument celebrating Francis Scott Key, the lyricist of the Star Spangled Banner, I projected a stop-motion video of myself wearing a false beard with text from Gloria Steinem’s book My Life on the Road. As a female-identifying artist and educator, the words resonated: “I worshipped dead men for their strength, forgetting I was strong” and “No wonder studies show that women’s intellectual self-esteem tends to go down as years of education go up. We have been studying our own absence.” This piece, titled Un-False Beard recognizes the continuing struggles for equality by layering this particular text over the lyrics to our national anthem.