Beretta Series 950
Paper and candy wrapper collage on cardboard (hook on back)
9 3/4" x 7 1/2"
2025
$40 + shipping for the month of October 2025 only
SOLD
The story behind this piece goes something like this: My parents emigrated to the US in 1965. They initially lived in a cheap place with a crooked floor above a sailor Bar in Hell’s Kitchen, NYC - where the Hustler Club is today - and were very poor. Eventually my father, a trained architect, landed an associate professorship and they moved to Ann Arbor, MI, and then to Baton Rouge, LA; finally he became a full professor at UT and the family moved to Austin, TX (where the third kid - me - was born).
When my father, a white man, taught at all-black Southern University in Baton Rouge, he received death threats from the KKK. Only many years later did he tell my mom this, and that he had bought a gun for protection and had hidden it under the bed.
We are a family that doesn’t particularly like guns and believes in strong gun regulation, so this came as a bit of a shock. But such were the times. And lately it feels like the disquiet and danger of that period have returned.
I’ve been organizing photos and letters I took from my mom’s Munich apartment after she died, and recently found a tiny old manual for the Beretta 950 series among these things. I used the title image for this collage, turning it into the odd creature’s head. I can’t be sure that this manual is from my dad’s gun back then, but I suspect it is.
When my father, a white man, taught at all-black Southern University in Baton Rouge, he received death threats from the KKK. Only many years later did he tell my mom this, and that he had bought a gun for protection and had hidden it under the bed.
We are a family that doesn’t particularly like guns and believes in strong gun regulation, so this came as a bit of a shock. But such were the times. And lately it feels like the disquiet and danger of that period have returned.
I’ve been organizing photos and letters I took from my mom’s Munich apartment after she died, and recently found a tiny old manual for the Beretta 950 series among these things. I used the title image for this collage, turning it into the odd creature’s head. I can’t be sure that this manual is from my dad’s gun back then, but I suspect it is.
%20in%20America%202021.jpg)
Posts
