We are All Targets (in a World that Worships Guns)

Date2017

Medium3 mil adhesive-backed vinyl on Sentra

Dimensions51 × 51 in. (129.5 × 129.5 cm)

ClassificationsPrint

Credit LineGift of the artist, 2017

Object numberUAC6579

DescriptionIn November of 2014, just before Thanksgiving, an argument between two men on Detroit’s west side metastasized into a gun fight. Both men — both close friends of artist Margi Weir — were killed in the ensuing shootout. A few months earlier, an unarmed African American youth, Michael Brown, had been shot to death by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, sparking several days of protest and civil unrest. “I just had to come to terms with it for myself,” Weir said in a 2017 interview with the St. Louis-based Higher Education Channel. Her subsequent artworks relating to gun violence in America were a way for the artist to “bear witness.” Weir’s exhibit at St. Louis Community College shared a title with the vinyl decal installation now in the Wayne State collection: We Are All Targets — Don’t Shoot. Resembling both the rotating silhouettes in a carnival shooting gallery and one of those fractal images that never seems to end no matter how closely one examines it, Targets is an optically dazzling illustration in which everything from cutout ducks and leaping deer to sheriff’s badges, children in strollers, and young men in hooded sweatshirts is caught in the crosshairs. Circling the perimeter of the image is a number of large birds — eagles? Buzzards? Even they’re not safe, all marked as targets. Stare at it long enough and the swirling scene can feel almost as overwhelming and endless as the tide of violence itself. Cognizant that African Americans are disproportionately the victims of gun homicide (according to the CDC, blacks are ten times more likely than whites to be murdered with firearms), Weir states that, as a white artist, she tries to be “sensitive to the fact that I’m making art about another race’s pain. I’m not trying to do anything except empathize.”

Text by Sean Bieri
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Margi Weir holds a several degrees: a BA in art history from Wheaton College, Massachusetts; a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute; an MA from Mexico State; and an MFA from UCLA. She came to Detroit from out west in 2009; unaccustomed to the industrial environment, she initially responded by creating a series of “portraits” of the city’s crumbling buildings called “Frontline: Detroit.” Much of the artist’s recent work takes inspiration from Grecian vases, Egyptian tomb paintings, and pre-Renaissance European paintings, with their stylized figures and flattened perspective. In 2017, she received a grant from the New Jersey-based Puffin Foundation to produce her series of works addressing gun violence. Weir is an associate professor of painting and drawing at Wayne State University.

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