Images of the United States: A Visual Research Exhibition

This image draws on Blessing Mensah’s (2026) research into the legacy of redlining in Oakland, California. Redlining defined geographic neighbourhoods according to racialized assessments of their value, allowing government and financial institutions to limit access to mortgages and investment in predominantly Black and Hispanic communities. Redlining has shaped patterns of housing (dis)investment that have continued long after the policy was formally prohibited. For example, Mensah connects redlining to the later concentration of surveillance and policing in historically marginalized neighbourhoods. 

Inspired by pointillism, this painting uses individual marks to construct an abstract urban landscape divided into two contrasting neighbourhoods. In the green sections, houses are more dispersed and surrounded by pools and greenery, which creates a sense of space and openness. In the red sections, the marks become increasingly dense: buildings appear crowded together and there is little greenery. Roads run through both areas, connecting them while also emphasizing their separation, as some roads even end without reaching the other side. Nevertheless, small traces of blue remain within the red landscape, suggesting persistence and resilience. By translating the history of redlining into an abstract visual form, the work asks viewers to consider how boundaries created through policy can become boundaries experienced in everyday life.

During the Progressive Era (approximately 1890–1930), women reformers played a central role in advancing landmark legislative changes, including child labour prohibitions, mothers' pension programs, juvenile court systems, and maternal and child health protections. Yet while these reforms offered meaningful protections, they simultaneously reinforced existing hierarchies of gender, class, and race. Women activists strategically mobilized "maternalist" rhetoric, leveraging their claimed expertise as mothers to justify political engagement while carefully avoiding direct challenges to male authority. This dynamic is visible in the Instructive District Nursing Program, established by Los Angeles settlement house workers in 1898, in which nurses conducted door-to-door "friendly visits" to poor families. Though permitted to advise mothers on hygiene and housekeeping, nurses were prohibited from diagnosing illness or administering treatment, responsibilities reserved for male physicians. The program also reveals entrenched class and racial asymmetries: nurses, predominantly middle-class and white, targeted families of Mexican descent, and "friendly visits" carried coercive dimensions, as non-compliant families could be reported to authorities. As Ladd-Taylor (1995, 9) argues, these contradictions were central to Progressive Era reform: motherhood functioned simultaneously as "the point of oppression and the point of departure for women activists." 

The neoliberal paradigm altered the very way in which labour, economic policy, and cultural sentiments were expressed in the post-1970s United States. Out of the covers of the welfare society, and in the midst of economic stagflation, unrest over unending wars, neoliberalism took hold in the form of laissez-faire economic policy and deregulation, leading to projects such as NAFTA. This picture, taken at the US-Mexico border, captures the confluences of such forces and their continuing effect today. The offshoring of industrial prowess to Mexico under NAFTA’s free trade zones, the resulting environmental impacts, have led to the rampant individualization and exploitation that corporations and capitalism require. Militarization, the logistics industry, and criminalization of the border converge in Southern California to create the geographical space in which neoliberalism becomes visible.  What do we focus on when someone views this picture? Is it the concertina wire, a unique wiring system meant to inflict maximum damage on human flesh? Is it the Nike shoe, a symbol of capitalism's wider reach, suspended in midair, prompting the question, how did it get there? The manifold ways of interpreting this image speak to the myriad ways in which the neoliberal paradigm plays out on the ground level for human beings caught in its crosshairs, from labourers, to immigrants, to “citizens”.