Our Hands Where You Can See Them

Our Hands Where You Can See Them (2018)
prototype playground equipment
(wood, bondo, paint, plexiglass, electronics)

Our Hands Where You Can See Them proposes to teach all children to put their hands out the window when pulled over by law enforcement as a gesture of de-escalation. Lavar Burton, star of the children’s show Reading Rainbow (during the artist’s own childhood) and contemporary to Mr. (Fred) Rodgers and Sesame Street, has spoken publicly about how he performs this gesture when pulled over by law enforcement “because I want that officer to be as relaxed as he can be.” Burton taught his son to do the same, and so may we teach our children.

Our Hands Where You Can See Them acknowledges the mutual exclusivity of racially-charged encounters with law enforcement, whereby those whose skin color doesn’t provoke initial suspicion do not lead with a fear for their personal safety, while those whose skin color does couldn’t imagine it otherwise. It proposes teaching de-facto equal treatment under the law in a land where “all men are created equal”. The vehicle form is modeled after a white 1988 Oldsmobile Eighty-Eight, the automobile Philando Castile owned and was killed in, and acknowledges the future inherited by his girlfriend’s four-year-old daughter seated behind him. The Eighty-Eight has been scaled to the match the height of an average twelve-year-old American male, which is the age of Tamir Rice when he was shot and killed by police while playing on a playground.