The paintings of Norman Rockwell depict a golden age of American life—of rosy-cheeked children and their loyal pets, nice, respectable families and close-knit communities of locally-owned businesses. Rockwell’s paintings are sweet like sugar gum drops, as colorful as a bowl of Froot Loops … as American as apple pie.

     “I unconsciously decided that, even if it wasn’t an ideal world, it should be and so painted only the ideal aspects of it,” Rockwell once said. “Pictures in which there are no drunken slatterns or self-centered mothers … only foxy grandpas who played baseball with the kids and boys who fished from logs and got up circuses in the backyard.”

     If this ideal sounds awfully antiquated nowadays, it’s because it is. Conglomerate corporations have overshadowed the mom-and-pop businesses of our golden age; our once booming economy has fallen and local identities are becoming harder to define.
    “In this age, the focus is upon people and places becoming more similar, losing the uniqueness of individual and local identity,”say David Gianfredi and Jason Lanegan in their shared artist statement. “The concept of self is getting harder to define as the capitalist consumer society rapidly expands and permeates all aspects of our lives.”