| Description: | Lisa originally situated her work within a period of intensifying social fracture in the United States. Since 2016, reported hate crimes in the U.S. rose sharply, reaching historic highs in the early 2020s and remaining near record levels through 2024–2025, with race, religion, sexual orientation/gender identity, and women being consistently the most frequent targets. Scholars and civil rights organizations, including the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, have documented how polarized political leadership and inflammatory public rhetoric can embolden bias and normalize hostility. Research commonly referred to as the “Trump effect” links the current political climate of the Trump presidency to increased expressions of prejudice and spikes in reported hate incidents, reinforcing concerns that leadership language shapes social norms and licenses cruelty.
This atmosphere of division is reinforced by the administration’s immigration agenda, which uses the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as the Gestapo-like force to enact Trump's will against not only immigrants but also American citizens, and others who disagree with him. The 2018 “zero tolerance” policy led to the systematic separation of thousands of children from their parents, a practice later described by the American Civil Liberties Union and Physicians for Human Rights as causing profound and lasting psychological harm. ICE expanded detention and enforcement operations, increasing arrests by 600% from January to October 2025. According to the American Immigration Council, "The result of these changes in arrest practices has been a 2,450 percent increase in the number of people with no criminal record held in ICE detention on any given day." The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General, among others, document overcrowding, medical neglect, prolonged detention of asylum seekers, and preventable deaths in custody. The Trump policies—often justified as border security—expose immigrants, including children, to conditions described as brutal and authoritarian, demonstrating how tyranny is enacted through bureaucratic systems as well as overt violence.
Outrage at policies that undermine humanitarian responsibility and international cooperation echoes longstanding critiques by scholars such as Noam Chomsky, who has warned that contemporary political leadership has accelerated ecological and humanitarian crises rather than confronting them. While rooted in the U.S. context, the work’s imagery emerged as Lisa listened to reports of the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar and the Yazidi genocide in Iraq, underscoring the global continuity of state violence, ethnic persecution, and patriarchal oppression. The skulls are constructed from heavy canvas and embroidered and appliquéd with black lace and red cloth. "The lace," she explains, "represents women, who so often bear the brunt of brutal, patriarchal regimes."
Handled with care, the layered fabrics form stark reminders that each skull signifies a living person: someone embedded in family and community, someone with hopes for a future that was never realized. Stitched beneath the title, the number 1,595,000,000+ refers to estimates of deaths under the thirteen most lethal dictatorships of the past century, anchoring the work in historical scale. The imagery, the numbers, and the lives behind them converge across historical, contemporary, global, and U.S. contexts, insisting on remembrance and reflection. The work is both memorial and warning—insisting on awareness that tyranny is alive, well, and taking over in the US. Protest is happening, as are injuries and deaths of innocent people. These sacrifices have just started, and there may be many more on the way to ousting the current tyrannical regime. |
