After Trump’s inauguration, ANOHNI was compelled to select a series of books and records from her collection and emblazon them with the directive “DON’T CRY”. Issued to both allies and enemies, the statement’s intended audience is defined by the nature of the media upon which it is painted. Suffice to say, the US has become a less safe place for certain demographics to express themselves.

Subcultural Californian kids in the early 1980s sought ways to defile the burgeoning fundamentalism rising around them among the fundamentalist christian taliban, then named “The Moral Majority”. These christian subscribers railed for the merciless treatment of gay people and others who were succumbing to the AIDS epidemic, and flooded schoolyards with graphic materials discouraging abortion,which young punks repurposed as gory material for collages and artworks. Comfort could always be taken in fantastical anthologies of witchcraft and resistance, hinting at other eras and centuries in which women and queens observed the manifest world as meaningful, rather than seeking to escape the cycle of life and return to a stasis of surveillance beneath the legs of some imaginaryand punitive father god.

DONT CRY WITCH, a 2 panel fontispiece painting, is a call for femme solidarity. Includes flyer for ANOHNI’s first exhibition in London “The Creek” (2009) and an ostrich feather bookmark.