American Dream

The American Dream
Susan Barton
Barbed Wire, Steel with Jute
40 x 30", Available for purchase



Echoing lines of dried and plowed agricultural fields of a past harvests, Susan Barton's, The American Dream, encapsulates the significance of America's immigrant and agricultural past, while resonating current stuggles of new immigrants to the United States.

Intending to explore her own great grandparents immigrant past, the textile becomes a visual narrative; one of any typical German family who immigrated from an impoverished, over populated Prussian state near the turn of the century, to their intended land of promise and hope-America. Like many, finding back breaking work in the nation's fields became the only starting point for a new immigrant to the United States. Corroded barbed wire reflects the past they left and injustices they would face in this new world: from past conscripted military duty and hardships of trying to earn a living in Germany, to new hard manual labor and growing resentments towards increased European immigrants within the United States. A rough edged and unfinished steel frame encompasses the textile, contrasting the once heavily agricultural opportunities of the country giving way to the emerging promise of larger urban cities and the beginnings of the industrial revolution.