The Spirit of The Spirit of the Snow is a commissioned piece for a University of Michigan visual history arts initiative. In creating this lenticular print, I chose to link together photographs of two Michigan students taken 86 years apart.

In May 1939, U-M student Alice Frayer was photographed for the local newspaper at the Michigan League with her prize-winning sculpture The Spirit of the Snow. Four months later, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. In 2025, I invited U-M Stamps School of Art & Design student Ben Michalsky to restage Frayer’s pose with one of his own sculptures, Profilo Continuo (Testa d’il Dunce)—a riff on Renato Bertelli’s 1933 Profilo Continuo (Testa di Mussolini)—where a directed light throws a shadow of Donald Trump’s profile. The lenticular flips between the two portraits: two students, two thresholds, two shadows.

Fascism is an ultranationalist, authoritarian politics that concentrates power in a single leader and uses censorship and violence to crush pluralism. By the best estimates, fascist regimes in World War II were responsible for roughly sixty-million deaths, most of them civilians.

By juxtaposing 1939 and 2025, this work asks how student artists build a creative practice and imagine their futures as deadly and destructive authoritarian tides rise—and what our attention, and our shadows, reveal.