American Dust
At the close of 2025, Mac was invited to create a two-hour live painting at a company headquarters in North Canton, Ohio. The brief was disarmingly simple: no restrictions, no guardrails, no corporate script. “I want you to come in and just let it rip,” the client told him. Mac took them at their word.
Through the winter holidays and into the first days of 2026, Mac found himself reflecting on four decades of American capitalism—its ambition, its contradictions, and its cost to our social, economic, cultural, and spiritual lives. The media reports were relentless. News of ICE’s killing of Renée Good and Alex Pretti. The Department of Homeland Security’s justification that they were “domestic terrorists.” Whitewashing of American history. Blatant racism. New revelations tied to Jeffrey Epstein. A steady drumbeat of corruption, indifference, and moral fatigue.
Two days before painting, an unexpected image surfaced in Mac’s mind: scenes from the 1958 film adaptation of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, based on the play by Tennessee Williams, and starring Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor. “I saw that film in 2000,” Mac recalls. “It rocked me. Even then, the story felt eerily relevant. I never imagined it would come back to haunt me in 2026.” The film’s themes of mendacity, inheritance, repression, and moral decay stuck with him.
The night before painting, Mac rewatched the film. The next morning, he measured and created the stencils. The client hoped the finished work could be done in a way that would allow them to move it in the future. To make that possible, Mac reached back into his stash of salvaged materials. In 2019, before the B.W. Rogers building was demolished in downtown Akron, Mac saved a series of vintage corporate manufacturing posters from the dumpster. These would be the foundation, literally and symbolically, of the new piece. Industrial messaging from another era, repurposed as a substrate for contemporary reckoning.
When he arrived at the headquarters, Mac re-measured the wall, set up the stencils in the company’s production room, and refined each piece. Six hours of preparation. Two hours of live painting. One hour of cleanup. Nine hours in total, but decades in the making.
“The title came to me as I worked,” Mac says. “The phrase American Dust captured the friction and inevitable end to the warring ideas and systems I had been observing. Prosperity and exploitation, faith and cynicism, truth and propaganda. I thought about how on a long enough timeline, dust is all that will remain.” One image became essential: a deer resting under a tree in the rain.
“That was my counterpoint,” Mac says. “That image comes from a real experience in Cambridge, Ohio. When it happened, my wife and I felt like it was her grandmother’s spirit visiting us. Faith is a vital part of my creative life. In a polarized and mendacious world, moments in nature like that are a reminder that there are things larger than all of us.”
Mac thinks of his paintings as rorschach tests. “What the viewer finds and comes to understand for themselves is most important to me,” he says. “I love to explore and create juxtapositions for subjective interpretation. I can imagine a million interpretations, and I strong opinions of my own, but I want viewers to make their own discoveries in my work.”
American Dust was born in freedom, between outrage and reverence, industry and spirit. It is a critique and confession. The last call of a dying empire.
