The Value and Power of Art IV

A monthly glimpse at the works in the current exhibition Gilded: Contemporary Artists Explore Value and Worth. On view at the Weatherspoon Art Museum at UNCG through April 8.

In Angela Fraleigh’s dynamic, large-scale paintings, female subjects culled from earlier images take on new lives. Throughout history, women have often been painted as objects for the male gaze, but in Fraleigh’s work, they exist for themselves and each other rather than for any viewer.

Here, she reimagines French artist Simon Vouet’s 1633 painting “Lot and His Daughters.” The biblical story recounts that when two angels came to visit Lot, the townsmen demanded he turn them over for their sexual pleasure. Instead, Lot offered up his daughters. The citizens refused the substitution, after which the angels destroyed the town. Believing no one else survived and determined to preserve humanity, the daughters intoxicated their father and slept with him to conceive children. Making him the unwitting subject of their sexual demands, their violation returned the fate he would have had for them.

Although interpreted by some scholars as a tale of both sacrifice and justice on the part of the daughters, painters historically exploited its erotic potential. Vouet represented Lot not as a passive victim, but an active seducer. Fraleigh has thought about how the story and its visual celebrations might also be perceived as a sort of “apologist tale for incest… a centuries-old way of normalizing something abhorrent.” In her interpretation, Lot is largely deleted, leaving the female figures to look not at him, but at each other. The two float in an idyllic world of their own, freed from their horrific narrative, and instead framed and supported by a tangle of gilded flowers and leaves.

Fraleigh took the floral design from the textile work of pioneering American artist Candace Wheeler, an advocate for women’s professional careers in the late 19th Century and the founder of the all-female design firm Associated Artists. Fraleigh has re-created the thistle pattern from a silk and metallic thread damask fabric that Wheeler produced with the Tiffany Company in about 1881, executing the pattern with gold leaf applied to appear tattered and worn, broken but still splendid. Underscored by the title “These Things are Your Becoming,” this gilded element honors both Wheeler and Lot’s daughters — and by extension the countless women who have taken control of their own fate — whether to excel or simply survive.

the Investigative Services Bureau. He has worked with the foot patrol, vice and narcotics, and crime prevention divisions, and has also served as District 1 commander and support services commander.

In an email to TCB, Penn said he grew up on the east side of Winston-Salem and has worked in every district of the city as a police officer. Penn said that he is service-oriented and believes in “truly knowing the community” that he serves.

“My community activities have allowed me to create impactful partnerships that allow me to seek opportunities to help everyone in our community,” he said.

Penn wants to be the next police chief because he believes that he can be an “agent for positive change within this agency and this city.”

“My professional experience, education and community relationships have prepared me for this position,” he said.

Penn says that he truly believes in the power of collaboration and that “those meaningful partnerships that will lead us to position the department for success, adding that he places a heavy emphasis on relationship building. Penn says he believes in the nobility of law enforcement, “especially the men and women of the Winston Salem Police Department.”

Police Chief Scott Booth has headed the Danville Police Department since 2018. Prior to his career in law enforcement that began in 1996 with the Richmond Police Department, Booth served in the US Army as a sergeant in a combat infantry platoon and a military police squad stationed in the United States, Germany, Korea, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Additionally, his service during Operation Desert Storm earned him the Combat Infantryman’s Badge. His leadership experience as a police chief also includes his career with the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority in Washington, DC.

“I’ve always been a very collaborative leader,” Booth said in an interview. “That would be my vision for Winston-Salem, a true community policing model where the community and the police are working daily together to collaborate and problem-solve. That’s what I believe in, that’s what’s worked for me.”

Booth added that he wants to be WSPD’s new police chief because it’s a diverse city with more opportunities and challenges.

“I think it’s got a really solid police department,” he said.

“I see the greatness that’s already there and how I could really take it to the next level.”

The Fair Tax canard

American patriots pay their taxes. They don’t spend millions on creative accounting to avoid their obligation; they don’t pull dollars out of the US economy and park them overseas; they don’t lie about their income to get out of paying their fair share.

Like it needs to be said: Taxes are what pays for everything, including our roads, our schools, our cops, our military, our courts and all the other pieces of our infrastructure that everyone, particularly billionaires, use all the time and rely upon for our livelihoods.

So it’s telling when one party — take a guess which one — comes out against funding the Internal Revenue Service, which is still using technology from the 1980s and, due to a hiring freeze from 2011-19, is short nearly 100,000 employees.

The defunding of the IRS has been a plank in the GOP platform for most of our entire lives, and they finally got it small enough to drown in a bathtub. Now comes the next phase of the plan: The Fair Tax.

The Fair Tax is a national sales tax based on consumption, replacing our system of income and corporate tax rates with a straightup 30 percent sales tax on just about everything. Think of it: No more tax deductions. No more IRS. No payroll tax, no income tax, no estate tax. We would collect from non-citizens every time they buy something. Even billionaires would be forced to kick in every time they got a new yacht. Prices would drop precipitously when companies don’t have to factor taxes into cost, proponents say, evening out over the long run.

And House Speaker Kevin McCarthy agreed to a vote on the Fair Tax as one of the concessions he gave to the Freedom Caucus to secure his election.

But like most of the ideas espoused by the Freedom Caucus, it is a terrible one.

It’s regressive, for one, benefiting the rich at the expense of the poor. Low-income households spend a much greater percentage of their income on consumer goods than wealthy households. Also, at 30 percent, it won’t raise as much money as our current tax system.

In 2011, when Mike Huckabee was touting the Fair Tax, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimated that the national sales tax would need to be between 45-40 percent to maintain our current revenue stream.

And while advocates say the Fair Tax is formulated to include Social Security payments, we have serious doubts about the sanctity of the program once individual accounts are no longer tabulated. It also penalizes seniors on fixed incomes, who will be spending 30 percent more but taking home the same amount as before. The only ones who would see a reduction in taxes, according to the Brookings Institution which analyzed the Fair Tax back in 1998, are the top 1 percent, who would save about $75,000 per year in 1998 dollars.

Granted, our tax system sucks and needs reform — that’s what the 87,000 new IRS agents and boost in budget is supposed to address. But beware of those who would replace it with something worse for everyone but them and their friends.