“Until we’re like clouds that tear like bread but mend like bones…”
Cloud Anthem art from the Two Ponds Press edition of Boundaries, poems and words by Richard Blanco, in the Special Collection.
“Boundaries is a collaborative project between Presidential Inaugural Poet Richard Blanco and contemporary landscape photographer Jacob Bond Hessler. Blanco’s poems and Hessler’s photographs together investigate the visible and invisible boundaries of race, gender, class, and ethnicity, among many others; they challenge the physical, imagined, and psychological dividing lines–both historic and current–that shadow America and perpetuate an us vs. them mindset by inciting irrational fears, hate, and prejudice.
In contrast to the current narrowing definition of an America with very clear-cut boundaries, Blanco and Hessler cross and erase borders. As artists, they tear down barriers to understanding by pushing boundaries and exposing them for what they truly are–fabrications for the sake of manifesting power and oppression pitted against our hopes of indeed becoming a boundary-less nation in a boundary-less world.”
