These prints are adapted from an acrylic painting that I worked on over the last two years. The image was inspired by a protestor I saw at an immigrant and worker rights march many years ago. It follows a long tradition of Via Crucis/Path of Sorrows imagery in devotional western art, but I also saw it as a meditation on labor and mutuality.

I was raised with a sort of philosophy of work, where art making and creative labor can be a kind of prayer, where there can be beauty in striving to become better at whatever we do and in the giving of oneself in service to others. Love, beauty, and work—all can be connected.

We are, nearly all of us, workers in some form or another, but that commonality gets overshadowed so often by cultural, racial, or various identity issues. Despite all our increasing digital connectedness we seem to be further separated and isolated in many ways. When we look at the world today and see that despite all the advancements much of our global family still suffers to some degree or another from poverty, exploitation, marginalization. Power and wealth continue to concentrate among a tiny few, while working people as a group steadily fall further into precarity. This is a trend that does not help build a world where it is easier for people to live or to love each other.

Just before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated he was helping striking sanitation workers, and in his last speeches he spoke of the dignity of labor and the importance of solidarity with other working people, of a kind of "dangerous unselfishness" described in the parable of the Good Samaritan. And what is dangerous unselfishness if not self-sacrificing love?

"To work to increase our love for God and for our fellow man (and the two must go hand in hand), this is a lifetime job. We are never going to be finished. Love and ever more love is the only solution to every problem that comes up. If we love each other enough, we will bear each other's faults and burdens. If we love enough, we are going to light that fire in the hearts of others.”-Dorothy Day