(c) Paetrick Schmidt

German artist Paetrick Schmidt created this phenomenal  collage painting and sent it my way in response and conversation with last week’s Edisto Bottle Tree essay…a long tirade comparing antebellum-era plantations to Nazi-era concentration camps, and requesting the United States follow Germany’s lead: recognize the human rights atrocities that happened there, protect them as national heritage sites, and use them to teach about bigotry and tolerance.

Paetrick makes some extraordinary work exploring various manifestations and artifacts of fascism. With obsessions like that, we absolutely had to cross paths.

And so we did…Mr. Schmidt and I both held Fellowships this autumn at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and together we explored the bottle trees in the Old Lynchburg City Cemetery, and he was my companion during the semi-arrest by the Virginia State Police at the Epilepsy hospital, reported in a BumbleMoth post entitled In Which The Artist Is Held For Questioning By The Virginia State Police and then a follow up essay  (Dear Richmond: on Love, Pilgrimage, and Redaction.)

Mr. Schmidt has an exquisite eye for the unsettling, a compassionate heart towards the forgotten victims of history, and a gift for the artistic act of conscience.  Plus, he’s funny.

I have great excitement for our future collaborations, and more mischievous field work together. Especially some good anti-fascist hijinks exploring the abandoned military sites of the former East Germany. Here is another of our conversations, this time about the Oberkampf station of the Paris metro.

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