Not because he is an amazing artist, doing great work in his community.
Not because of the monumental work the Alabama Contemporary Art Center is doing to project great artistry into a world desperate for a palliative against the noxious and uncultured depravity of fascism.
No, Rodrigues' work resonates with me because it is my lived experience. The lived experience of job insecurity. Of wage stagnation. Of housing precarity.
The Great Recession—or whatever fragmented, damned, deluded and illusory thing we're attempting to project onto that space and time—began during the 2007 holiday season, when the shadow banking system collapsed due to
Foreclosures on residential homes skyrocketed, while banks that were too-big-to-fail® were bailed out, socializing losses and privatizing gains. The middle class wealth that had been built for decades on home ownership evaporated, while the securities of the wealthiest one percent went untouched. The ensuing recovery served only to exacerbate this outcome. By 2011, a quarter of American families had lost around 75% of their wealth.
Like dominoes, the collapse of the housing market resulted in the subsequent collapse of the homebuilding industry, resulting in a decade-long housing shortage that inflated prices across the board.
The enormous amount of capital injected into a residential real estate market already struggling with supply issues caused rampant inflation of rental prices, effectively closing the door on housing for individuals and families already reeling from economic disaster and turmoil. More than 90% of U.S. counties saw rents rise faster than incomes between 2000 and 2020.
When the Fed began to aggressively raise interest rates starting in 2022 to bring down inflation, those who locked in mortgages at lower rates had no incentive to renegotiate their position, further stalling any potential market correction.
And so we see average home prices of $410,800—a 42% increase in a decade—and wages that haven't substantially moved or kept up with worker production since 1979.
This is my lived experience, part of the story of the American Dream for the past 45 years, captured perfectly in Rodrigues' exhibit.
Return to the specific - to Rodriges's work, to Mobile, to the tent, to the May Day frame. Continue/end on what that something actually is rather than on a universal abstraction.