Medicine for a Nation in Distress- original

Medicine for a Nation in Distress
Original oil on panel, 16 x 20 in | One of a kind

Medicine for a Nation in Distress is an original painting, a portrait of a nation in distress. An American flag hangs upside down, the position the U.S. Flag Code reserves for “dire distress.” Across it, Ojibwe jingle cones overlap the stripes and the blue field, and the stars spill past the blue as though they cannot be confined to it.

The jingle cone is a healing form. The jingle dress tradition arose among the Ojibwe during the 1918 influenza pandemic, and the sound of its cones is understood as medicine. Here, the cones also read a second way. Their pointed silhouettes echo the hoods of the Ku Klux Klan, an image of racial terror. The doubled image is deliberate. The painting holds sacred healing and the history of violence in the same shape, calling back to the enslavement of African peoples, the dispossession and destruction of Native peoples, and the ongoing harm to citizens of this country.

The viewer cannot look at one meaning without the other. That is the point. A nation that wants to heal has to look at what it has done, what the people who survived it have carried and still carry, and then choose to listen. In the jingle dress tradition, healing begins with sound.

Part of the artist’s Social Justice and Resilience series, alongside Eco Warriors and Maajtaawin Gizhi-Bimaadizin.

About the Original

This is the original, one-of-a-kind painting, not a print. It is painted in oil on panel in 2026 and signed by the artist. [Prints of this painting are available separately.]

Details

• Medium: oil on panel
• Size:16x20in
• Edition: Original, one of a kind
• Year: 2026
• Signed: Yes, on the front / on the back
• Edges: Framing recommended
• Framing: Sold unframed
• Shipping: Ships insured, in a protective crate or box.
• Certificate of authenticity:  included