The American_tier

Where: Goodwin Fine Art Gallery

1255 Delaware Street

Denver, CO 80204

When: April 17-May 30

Cost: Free

We Millennials were born into a world already dialed into text messaging and digital communication, making it impossible to imagine a time when such technology didn’t exist. Artist Shawn Huckins puts this idea into perspective when he asks: “If Lewis & Clark could comment today, would they click the ‘like’ button, or post ‘wtf?’ and then go check their Miley Cyrus tweet?”

In his series The American_tier, Huckins recreates historical 18th Century paintings, such as a black-and-white portrait of Abraham Lincoln, to reflect modernity. His acrylic paintings are so accurate, in fact, that they could be mistaken for the originals—except for one minor detail. Each traditional painting is covered in text messaging lingo and social media acronyms that we, as college students, use on a regular basis.

Abraham Lincoln’s face, for example, is covered in huge white letters that spell out the word “whatever.” Huckins’ remake of a 1850s painting, “Fishing On The Mississippi” has the phrase, “CUZ DEY BROKE, BUT ALWYS HV $$$ 4 WHISKY,” written on it. His rendition of the 18th Century painting “The Checker Players” has “#omfg” in bold over the players’ faces.

Undoubtedly, a transition from paper to online platforms has changed the way we verbalize our thoughts. Huckins opens an interesting debate when he says in his personal statement, “…does how we communicate govern the value of what we communicate? The physical act of typing very fast on small devices has undeniably impacted spelling, grammar and punctuation, encouraging a degree of illiteracy that has become the new social norm.”

We substitute full sentences with numbers and symbols in exchange for faster communication, often mutilating the English language past the point of verbal comprehension.

However, Huckins also reasons that, “these additions do not signify the death of the English language, but rather as a growing and evolving method of communication, which changes, as does our world.”

To say times have changed is a bit of an understatement, and to say that all millennials talk in this manner is a generalization, but picturing colonial figures speaking with the same jargon used today is both hilarious and hard to imagine.

To see for yourself, visit Goodwin Fine Art Gallery for more on Shawn Huckins’s art.