Exhibited at the Fine Arts Center, Ohio State Fair
Hang On to the Good Stuff takes its name from something my father often said — a simple phrase that became a compass for navigating chaos, memory, and meaning. When I returned to New York, I noticed something on the graffiti walls that echoed his words: no matter how many layers of paint accumulated, there was always one untouched spot. Artists would paint around it, honor it, even integrate it. Something sacred remained. This painting grew from that realization.The surface is a collision of saturated reds, electric blues, and fractured blacks — a living wall of urgency and layered history. French phrases like La conscience est le moteur de la liberté (“Consciousness is the engine of freedom”) are scrawled across the canvas in a raw, graffiti-like hand, repeated like incantations, half-erased and half-insistent. Threaded through them are the questions that shaped the work: What is art? Why do we make it? When does it matter most?
At the center, one face remains untouched — the image of Christ. It is the witness, the anchor, the part of the painting that was never overwritten. Every other form is obscured, buried beneath gesture and pigment. This preserved face becomes the emotional and spiritual fulcrum: the “good stuff” that endures when everything else is in flux. It holds the same reverence as those untouched graffiti fragments — a reminder that some truths are protected even in chaos.
Under blacklight, hidden glyphs and energetic pathways emerge, revealing a subconscious architecture that asks not only what we preserve, but what guides us when we create. Is art born in aftermath, in protest, in devotion, in healing — or is it always present, waiting to be revealed under the right light?
Selected for exhibition at the Fine Arts Center at the Ohio State Fair, Hang On to the Good Stuff stands as a meditation on memory, faith, and the fragments we refuse to let disappear. It holds space for what survives, and invites each viewer to consider their own untouched center — the part of themselves they protect when the world paints over everything else.
