"[Some artists have pointed to the] implicit bias and explicit racism across society and judicial systems. Triggers are pulled less quickly for white suspects. Whiteness bleaches out the face of the 17-year old in Adrian Piper’s print Imagine (Trayvon Martin), framed by a red gun sight. The subtle fade is captioned with “Imagine what it was like to be me.” The draining of color is individual and collective—the lost blood of one black teenager and too many black men. 

Adrian Piper’s earlier works expanded the vocabulary of Conceptual Art and Minimalism by introducing issues of race and gender along with overtly political content.  Often positioning herself as a subject assuming confrontational stances or adopting passive-aggressive strategies, she forces audiences to face their own prejudices or preconceptions.  Imagine (Trayvon Martin) invites viewers to step outside themselves, to identify with someone like the 17-year-old teenager who was fatally shot in 2012 by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer in Sanford, Florida.  Zimmerman followed Trayvon Martin one evening after he visited a convenience store and reported him as behaving suspiciously. Despite being told by the non-emergency dispatcher that they did not need him to follow the ‘suspect,’ Zimmerman nonetheless encountered Martin.  Claiming self-defense, he shot him with his licensed Kel-Tec PF-9 9mm semi-automatic pistol, a typical model for concealed carry.  Regardless of the many conflicting claims surrounding this and similar cases, would such encounters end in death if weapons were not on hand, whether carried by civilians or law enforcement? The acquittal of Zimmerman, along with subsequent high-profile verdicts favoring those who shoot unarmed civilians, produces rage and dismay in and outside of this country.  Piper’s portrait of a black youth fading behind red crosshairs is both an indictment of a biased society’s endemic racial profiling and an invitation to regard people like Martin as more than ‘mythic beings’—more than a ‘menacing black male’ in a hoodie.  She invites us personally and collectively to imagine what it was like to be Trayvon Martin, walking in the neighborhood where he was staying—70 yards from his back door."