After Granny developed Alzheimer’s disease, she began hallucinating. Her phantoms ranged from people having sex in our backyard, to the mafia having a sit-down in her bedroom, to a young man’s funeral occurring in our closet. "He had AIDS," she whispered to me after one of these funerals. I had stopped taking her to church or to places with large crowds, because her hallucinations and delusions followed her. I never knew when she was going to start yelling at the invisible people.
Esteban del Valle is an interdisciplinary artist born in Chicago, Illinois in 1984. He completed his MFA in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2009, where he received a Presidential Scholarship and the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship. His work investigates the performance of leadership, the role of the artist as a public figure, and the effects of class and privilege on institutions in the form of paintings, murals, sculpture and video art.
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