Miko Brooks
- May 24, 2024
- 2 min read
Updated: Jun 17, 2024
Student Art Contest: Senior Division, Honorable Mention
10th Grade – Nathan Hale High School
My ideal democracy is the involvement of a diverse group of people, free of judgment and all having the right to voice their opinions. In my art piece, half the page depicts the capitol attack on January 6th, 2021. The Republican party sought to prevent Congress from finalizing Joe Biden’s win, therefore crushing the idea of democracy. I painted the background red to symbolize the Republican party. The conservative flag in the front of the capitol, represents the attempt to overthrow Congress. On the right half of my painting, the background is blue symbolizing the Democratic party. Barbed wires take up the mid ground, and the front is a ballot box, which stands for the right to vote. This right was stripped from Japanese Americans during World War II, as they were interned in concentration camps. Minoru Yasui fought to change this mistreatment. Putting his career on the line, he intentionally broke curfew in the name of justice. As a country, we need to take stands like Yasui, voice our opinions without violence, and be patient and understanding. He became chair of the Japanese American Citizens League, specifically on the wrongful imprisonment of Japanese Americans in World War II. Against all odds, he fought for democracy, and the rights of Japanese Americans. I included a quote from Yasui, “If we believe in America, if we believe in equity and democracy, if we believe in law and justice, then each of us, when we see or believe that errors are being made, has an obligation to make every effort to correct them.” This topic means a lot to me as my grandparents and great-grandparents were interned along with so many other Japanese Americans. To protect a true democracy, everyone’s rights must be preserved.
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The level design in Drive Mad keeps introducing new obstacles without feeling repetitive. It’s one of those games that’s easy to start and hard to stop playing.
The way the artist links January 6th with Japanese American internment is uncomfortable in a good way — it pushes past “current events” and into the bigger pattern of what happens when people decide some citizens don’t fully count. The ballot box in front feels like a quiet challenge: voting is ordinary, but it’s also something people have had to fight for. Total tangent, but I was reorganizing my closet using StyleLookLab and it made me think about how visuals communicate identity fast — your painting does that with politics and history, not fashion.
That contrast between the capitol imagery and the ballot box really underlines how fragile the “normal” parts of democracy are until they’re threatened. The Yasui angle is a good reminder that rights can get taken away through law and bureaucracy, not just mobs. Side thought: I saw a little ghibli ai tool recently and it made me think about how style choices can soften a message — this piece does the opposite and stays sharp, which feels right for the topic.
The split red/blue composition is a smart way to show how democracy can be attacked and defended at the same time, and the barbed wire + ballot box combo hits hard given the internment reference. I also like that it calls out “voice our opinions without violence” instead of treating protest and intimidation as the same thing. Random aside: I once tried a quick simple binary translator for a class and it reminded me how symbols can carry totally different meanings depending on context, kind of like the imagery here.