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Apr 13, 2026

NYBG: ORCHID SHOW 2026

Apr 13, 2026

The most fantastic thing about the New York Botanical Garden’s annual Orchid Show is the orchids themselves

Apr 13, 2026

Alexandra 4/13/26 Alexandra 4/13/26

NYBG: ORCHID SHOW 2026

The most fantastic thing about the New York Botanical Garden’s annual Orchid Show is the orchids themselves

From 2013-2018, I went to the New York Botanical Garden’s annual Orchid Show six years in a row. Only a few of the shows were loosely themed: 2017’s Thailand; Dale Chihuly’s curving glass sculptures dotted the garden’s grounds in 2018, but only one of them appears in my photos from the conservatory; I didn’t go in 2019, but the theme was similarly inconspicuous (Singapore).

Have you ever seen thousands of orchids thriving up close? They’re magical. They’re improbable. They’re downright spiritual. Some of them look like slippers and others give off a sweet scent like living chocolate bars. They are the ultimate anecdote to AI: designed by actual intelligence, animated by a mysterious lifeforce, and cultivated by human hands. I love a good theme, but I have never once left the show wanting for a singular thread to tie it all together or wishing for extraneous set pieces to distract from the orchids’ other-worldly beauty.

This year, however, the garden put the show’s pollen-covered reins into the gloved hands of Mr. Flower Fantastic, described in official press interviews as “one of the most in-demand floral artists in the world.” MFF is a pseudonym for a Queens-born graffiti artist who transitioned into making “bold, sculptural works that blend art, fashion, and pop culture,” entirely out of flowers; his resume is undeniably impressive, including clients such as Serena Williams, Nike, and Netflix.

In photos, MFF is shown among the garden’s orchids, wearing a black hat, jacket, and goggles. He dons latex gloves and a respirator due to a severe flower allergy and to allow “the focus to stay on the art rather than the artist.” I would argue that his steampunk, Banksy-like aesthetic feels tired and actually does the exact opposite. Which might be a good thing: I had high expectations for this year’s show—billed as “a vibrant celebration of New York City and the extraordinary beauty that can bloom in even the most unexpected places”—but I was disappointed.

Even if the show’s ungainly official title, The Orchid Show: Mr. Flower Fantastic’s Concrete Jungle, still technically gives orchids top billing, it also makes clear that this year’s installation has been curated by a Famous Artist. Jockeying for the spotlight within MFF’s concrete-less jungle, the delicate, diminutive orchids put up a good fight—but everything that was built around them feels fantastically flat.

The first piece you see upon entering the always-dazzling Enid Haupt Conservatory, is a brownstone covered in orchids. Or maybe it’s the second, or tenth thing you notice; I wouldn’t be surprised if you missed this show-opener entirely. Set in the middle of a small pond, the monochromatic brownstone (which here is rendered pitch black, as are most of the other set pieces in the show) disappears almost completely behind a cascade of colorful orchids. And maybe that’s the point! I understand how contrast works. If you want to let the flowers shine, slathering everything in matte black paint is a good way to do so.

But smoothing out any ounce of originality or grit from objects and places that appear in infinite variations across the five boroughs—including trash cans, a Dumpster, fire escape, car wash, pizza parlor, and laundromat—is a weird way to celebrate a city as artistically fruitful city as New York. I was prepared to look for “beauty in unexpected places,” I just didn’t think the places themselves would be so devoid of character.

As you work your way around the conservatory, the set pieces and accompanying signage feel increasingly cheap, like 3D-printed, Temu-knock-off versions of their real life counterparts better suited for a Hollywood backlot version of “The Big Apple” than in a flower show set in the actual city of New York. I can almost guarantee that there are high school productions of West Side Story being staged in the Midwest right now with more authentic sets.

At best, the installations recede into the background and cede attention back on the orchids: My uncle went with me, said he ignored the New York theme completely, and enjoyed himself. At their most unforgivable, MFF’s creations were too complex to interplay with orchids at all—or lazily designed that way: Oversize pizza slices, an orange-and-white striped steam tube, and the back half of a lifesize cab (bearing the license plate ORCH1D) are covered in (fake!) carnations.

Forgive me for being literal, but I come to the orchid show to see orchids, and I came to this show specifically to see orchids set amongst “a dazzling reimagining of the Big Apple, from stoops and slice shops to the subway itself.” I suppose the “reimagining” part is technically correct, but I wish MFF had more imagination, particularly with the signage. His newsstand, slice shop, laundromat, and car wash are saddled with uninspired names and signs to match (particularly unforgivable in a city that includes generations of free graphic inspiration and a newly-opened museum dedicated to preserving it).

They’re not only visually boring, but he also could have used a better copywriter. Some of the floral puns are better than others: a soda case contains Sprout (aka Sprite, cute) but also a headscratching variation of Diet Coke called “Natural Orchid” (what?). Inflation has yet to hit Fantastic’s Pizzeria, where slices are 99 cents and come with appetizing toppings such as Dendrobium Stems and Cymbidium Tubers. (A disclaimer warns that not all orchids are edible, but doesn’t specify further).

Conversely, the machines in Fantastic Laundromat “cost” $5 and direct visitors to scan a QR code to learn more about the orchids peaking out from behind round windows. This isn’t a criticism unique to the garden unfortunately, but the last thing I want to do—especially when I’m in a conservatory full of extraordinary live plants—is be tethered to my phone. (I’d take a visually dull explanatory placard over none at all).

I promise I am not a pearl-clutching white person aghast that a Black graffiti artist was let loose on one of New York’s sacred spaces. I wanted more graffiti. More proof of life. Something messy and imprecise as an anecdote to the perfection of the orchids. The Dumpster and trash cans felt too pristine. The familiar-but-faux scaffolding devoid of any stickers, sharpie tags, or layers of old wheatpasted posters. There is just one nod to MFF’s previous life as a graffiti artist: the tag MFF spelled out in (more fake) flowers affixed to a subway “tile” wall in the “Orchid Avenue” stop.

MFF says that his show is an homage to two Jamaicas: the one in Queens, where he grew up, and the island where his ancestors were from. With respect to residents of both, I don’t think the show does a good job of transporting visitors to either. And I wanted it to do so, badly!

I can’t blame the garden—I understand why they fell for MFF’s pitch. But in a city full of so many underemployed artists, I’m annoyed that garden officials chose this particular capital A Arteest, who has the nerve to call himself “Mr. Flower Fantastic,” (too literal, even for me) while delivering a show where the only fantastic moments are delivered by the thing he seems to had little to do with: the (real) flowers themselves.

Alexandra 4/28/25 Alexandra 4/28/25

4.1.25: L'Enfant Plaza + HUD

Starting at the end of last year, my friend Sandy (a very talented photographer and native Washingtonian) and I have taken semi-regular walks around the city. We first met outside of the Supreme Court while we were both taking photos independently of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s coffin on the court steps in September 2020.

It’s easy to meet fellow photographers at historic events (or any number of protests, direct actions, and rallies around the city), but becoming actual friends with anyone (especially introverted photographers—like myself—who prefer being behind the lens for a reason) requires a bit of work from both parties involved.

When Sandy suggested we begin to take dedicated photo walks—with no set agenda other than the expectation that we would see some cool stuff and each document it in our own ways—I was thrilled. We squeezed in one last walk before my recent hip surgery, this one dedicated to the often-maligned architecture so prominent in the District: Brutalism.

We started our walk in L'Enfant Plaza, a late-1960s urban renewal project that came at the expense of a majority-Black neighborhood, whose residents were forced out by eminent domain. The project was almost immediately plagued by delays, funding deficits, and other bureaucratic problems, but the original design was provided by I. M. Pei.

Most of the buildings razed were Victorian row houses; they were replaced with four large office buildings (North, South, East, and West)—which at various times in history have housed a hotel, movie theater, and the U.S. Postal Service’s headquarters—in addition to a sweeping promenade and an underground mall. In 2019, the International Spy Museum relocated to a new building located across the plaza from the USPS.

Only a few years after its dedication, the hulking James V. Forrestal Building cut off the plaza’s view of the National Mall, but it was a net-positive for fans of Brutalism (which does not include famous paragon of good taste, Donald Trump). I’ll leave the architectural criticism to real architects, but to me (and luckily Sandy as well), Brutalist buildings are a dream to photograph.

It wasn’t long into our walk before Sandy pointed out that I could switch my camera settings to capture in black and white; it technically captures in color as well, but displays in black and white—which might not seem like that big of a deal in the digital age, but it really changed how I composed and shot photos for the rest of the day.

Aside from a few high school and college classes, I’m not a well-trained or professional photographer, but I’ve mostly gotten over any insecurities I have when it comes to making or sharing photos. Yes, almost everyone is a photographer now that we all have phones with remarkable cameras in our pockets at all times, but for me, using my “big camera” is the perfect way to combine my love of visual storytelling and the exploration of interesting places.

I detest gatekeeping and arrogance in any arena, but it can be especially palpable in the photography world. Even if I agree with Dina Litovsky that shooting in (or editing to) black and white can be a crutch used to artificially elevate a mediocre photograph (she calls it “art sauce”), in this case the switch reinvigorated the way I saw the plaza and street photography in general. (I joked that I suddenly felt like Berenice Abbott).

The geometric beauty of Brutalism—with its repetitive shapes, sharp angles, and dramatic shadows—can really be appreciated without the added distraction of color. Forcing myself to focus on light and dark, lines and shapes, and the stoic interplay between all of it, was a fun departure from the colorful chaos of a protest or other people-centric event.

Right next to L’Enfant Plaza is the Robert C. Weaver Federal Building, built by the GSA in 1968, and home to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Designed by architect Marcel Breuer, and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2008, the HUD building has always stopped me in my tracks with it’s sweeping, curved facade that looks like a capital I (with bent serifs) from above.

In the early 1990s, landscape architect Martha Schwartz was commissioned to redesign the plaza. The finished product is the result of compromises requested by then-Secretary Andrew Cuomo (this fucking guy!), who nixed Schwartz’s brightly-colored canopies in favor of neutral white. The circular structures have been compared to UFOs (both negatively, and positively), and in 2004 The Project for Public Spaces rated the plaza the eighth-worst public plaza in the world (agree to disagree!).

Alexandra 2/20/25 Alexandra 2/20/25

2.20.25: Vigil for Martyred Journalists

Outside of the National Press Foundation Awards Dinner at The Ritz-Carlton, Washington, D.C., organized by LiberationLensDC.

Alexandra 1/18/25 Alexandra 1/18/25

1.18.25: People's March

A friend and I took a bus from New York City to D.C. for the very first Women’s March in January 2017. It was just a day trip—we left from 42nd Street at 3 am and began the return trip around 6 pm. We were in a crowd so densely packed that by the time our section actually started “marching” we had to break off and head back to catch our bus. I had little concept of where I was the entire day, and even looking back at my photos after living in D.C. for five years I can’t exactly orient myself.

8 years—and countless marches later—I photographed the rebranded People’s March and below is just a small slice of what I saw on the Saturday before inauguration day in Washington, D.C.

I love this person’s whole vibe: the handwritten sign (double-sided is the way to go!), the bright pink gloves, mask, smiley face hat, and shirt that says “discomfort.” I know it’s superficial and beyond the point to focus on looks in Trump’s America, but compassionate, intelligent, interesting, cool people are just so much hotter than your standard MAGA.

People are so creative! I’ve seen this guy in his patriot outfit and paper mache toilet before. It’s a great visual and it’s fun to photograph people like this who are clearly there to be seen—I like the toilet paper and the real handle. A+

I love a petty slogan as much as I love an eloquent one. “Trump you’re tacky and we hate you,” made me laugh.

Carrying a sign and an iced beverage—trust women to do it all!

I told this woman that I was from Ohio and I agreed with, and appreciated, her sign.

“When will I be mine?” really gutted me. What a sign! I got unexpectedly emotional at this march, despite my ever-shifting views on their efficacy in affecting real change. Don’t hate on the people out there marching or making pithy signs or puss hats; they are not your enemy!

The people in power are! And so are your neighbors or uncles or husbands or grandmothers who voted for a ra(c)pist with mythical powers to lower egg prices. You know who isn’t your enemy? The trans person using a bathroom or an immigrant doing what’s best for their family or a person with a body making their own decisions about what that body endures. How do you reconcile two ideologies where one believes everyone matters and the other thinks almost no one does.

This person was so proud of their outfit, and I love this energy.

What we mean when we say “not all, but most men,” here are three examples of how to be an ally.

This person was so cute twirling two flags: a pride flag and one with a picture of Princess Leia that says “We are the Resistance.” They did an entire Little-Edie-esque flag dance for me, and it’s one of the rare times I wish I were taking video instead of stills.

Alexandra 12/22/24 Alexandra 12/22/24

12.13.24: A winter walk

This was the second of two dedicated photo walks that I’ve taken this year with my friend Sandy. I met Sandy at one of the events following Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death in 2020. Protests and public funerals are a great way to meet likeminded friends, although most of the fellow photographers I meet are a bit shy at first. I tend to like being behind the lens, observing until I begin to get to know you. And then, I’ll request that you pick me up downtown after my chiropractor appointment and drop me off at home in time for my Amazon grocery delivery. Sandy is just the kind of friend who offers the first, and doesn’t balk at the latter.

A few days after this walk, I bought something on facebook marketplace, and the guy told me he lived “in the ugly building across from the Cosmos Club,” which I only had just learned about when Sandy and I walked by it.

I first saw this HOPE poster and didn’t realize it had a second half until I saw one intact a few minutes later.

Totally unrelated: it’s wild to think that a lot of these embassies and art museums used to be single family homes in the Gilded Age and before. What will we have to convert for the greater good when this current Gilded Age comes crashing down? The Cybertrucks aren’t even going to last until climate change renders winters extinct.

I just cannot resist a winter berry. The red and green just does something so soothing to my eyeballs (it’s why I picked it as my main color scheme in my living room!). I’m glad I live in a time when most of the poisonous plant research has been done because I do not fault all of the people throughout history who have seen something so delicious like this in the middle of a bleak winter and thought: yum.

I joked that the theme of the day was “lions” after I took this streak of photos. Then I joked, as I was taking a photo of this deflated santa, that I thought inflatable decorations were lazy. Sandy said she put up inflatables and I wanted to crawl in a hole and die, but she agreed with me: “No, we are lazy,” she said.

Sandy is a native Washingtonian and has lived here a good chunk of her adult life as well; although we didn’t go on a predetermined walking tour like Nicky and I usually to do, Sandy was an insightful tour guide, pointing out the hotel entrance where Reagan got shot (a sad day, Sandy says, because he didn’t die), and a bronze statue of St. Jerome that used to reside at a monastery near her childhood home until it was moved to the Croatian embassy on Massachusetts Ave NW (its sculptor was Croatian).

~enhance bird~

~enhance~

Hi bud.

As a frequent dog walker, I try to adhere to people’s signs about where (and more often, where not) a dog can poop, but you know, sometimes they just can’t control it. I realize this trash can refers to people dropping bags of dog poop into a private person’s home trash can, which I understand can be tempting, but come on people. Hold that shit until you get to a city trash can—or better yet, hide it in a hot hallway of the Heritage Foundation or Congress. If they catch you claim ignorance: “Well, I didn’t see a sign that said I couldn’t dump my cat litter in Ted Cruz’s office.”

I’m a sucker for a lucky cat but I don’t actually own one. I’m sure that glaring omission in my collection of kitsch will rectify itself one day.

The photos that Sandy and I take have a lot of overlap, but even if the subject is the same, the point of view is always unique. We both spotted this “missing” sign and didn’t see the “dog” at first. Either way, it was worth a photo. What do you do when your missing dog poster goes missing?

What photos can never show is all that takes place before, after, and during their creation. I’ve always loved scrapbooking or visual memory keeping—when I look at these photos I remember the snippets of conversation that preceded or were prompted by a particular scene. Most aren’t relevant to anyone but me and Sandy, and even then most of what is said is lost, as it probably should be—the point is always both the journey and the destination.

I don’t know who Jeff is, but I bet he deserves it.

Alexandra 11/4/24 Alexandra 11/4/24

Nadine Seiler hopes she’s wrong

Nadine Seiler and I have different recollections about the first time we became aware of the other. Mine takes place on January 11, 2020, at the Lincoln Memorial. I had been visiting D.C. for a climate crisis protest and had time to kill before my train back to New York. I spotted a group that had unfurled a large black-and-white “Remove Trump” banner on the steps just below Lincoln; when they started to walk toward the White House, I grabbed a corner and walked with them in silent solidarity. Nadine marched beside the banner, carrying her own handmade anti-Trump sign. I didn’t talk to her then, but I never forgot her.

Six months later, when I moved to D.C. in June 2020, I would come to associate Nadine with the fence that had been erected around Lafayette Park to protect Trump’s fragile ego and upside-down Bible from the Black Lives Matter protests. Although she quickly became a near-constant presence on the plaza until fence camed down at the end of January 2021—and is crucial to preserving its oral and visual history going forward—Nadine insists that she has marched into the roles of curator, historian, and prolific protestor the same way most of her life has unfolded: accidentally.

“I’m not that smart,” she tells me several times when we talk in depth on November 1, 2024. “Almost everything is an accident. I’m not a visionary, I’m not a leader-type person. I’m a people watcher. I observe.” As an observer myself, I regret not asking more about her life sooner. But whenever I’ve been lucky enough to spot Nadine over the past four-and-a-half years—whether she’s among a crowd of thousands or standing solo outside of the Supreme Court with one of her signature spray-painted sheet banners—there always seems to be something more pressing to discuss than backstory. When we finally sit down and I ask what motivated her to start protesting Trump in particular, she says it was the third season of The Apprentice.

“The overqualified Black guy won and Trump wanted him to share the prize with a white woman,” Nadine recalls. “That pissed me off immediately and I never watched after that.”

Trump indictment celebration tour, August 3, 2023

Living in Maryland since the early 2000s, she says she was aware of the emergence of the Tea Party and had attended rallies in favor of the Affordable Care Act and Black Lives Matter protests. But she never forgave Trump—and still doesn’t understand how anyone with critical thinking skills could support him. “When he came down that escalator I thought ‘America is going to laugh him off the stage,’” she says. “And then he actually got into office and I just couldn’t believe it.”

On January 21, 2017, Nadine says she ended up in the inaugural Women’s March by accident—and she’s been a fixture in activist spaces in D.C. and across the country ever since. “Whatever is going on I’m just there, I find myself in it,” she says. “I’m an all or nothing person, when I get into something I really get into.”

When I ask what inspires her to keep going, what gives her the energy to keep pulling her omnipresent cart (overflowing with signs and telescopic poles, and blasting protest anthems) through the streets, she offers her favorite African proverb as an explanation:

“I am because we are.”

She adds: “If someone says to me ‘Thank you for being out here, you give me energy to come out,’ that gives me energy. Nobody asked me. Nobody appointed me. Nobody elected me. But if I can get people to come out and help get us to the goal line, I’ll do it. That motivates me.”

Black Lives Matter

While she was at Lafayette Square at the end of May 2020 (shortly before it would be symbolically christened Black Lives Matter Plaza), Nadine noticed that signs that had appeared organically on the fence during the protests had begun to fall down and litter the sidewalk. Her work as a home organizer had dried up during the pandemic, but when she overheard people complaining that the area was dirty, she put her organizational skills to work.

“Initially I just pushed it aside, then I started intentionally tending to it,” she says. Soon she was joined by (a good) Karen—who Nadine describes as the fence’s “stage manager”—and a handful of other volunteers who protected and maintained the public space from tourist crowds by day and would-be vandals at night. Using tape, zip ties, and a knitting needle, Nadine’s primary goal was to make the signs harder to destroy.

Black Lives Matter Plaza, November 5, 2020

After a lot of the ephemeral artwork was vandalized by a MAGA group in late 2020, volunteer art builds helped to recreate or replace what had been lost. This is how Nadine remembers first meeting me—I was helping to reattach signs to the fence and she begins our interview with an apology, saying she thinks she may have been short with me. I don’t recall her ever being anything but friendly, but the way she treats people matters to her—and things stick with her. Although by any metric she is one of the most compassionate people I’ve ever met, she insists her giving mindset is largely self-serving.

“I’m an immigrant,” Nadine says. “I’m a Black female and I’m also an atheist. In all those groups we are all marginalized in some way, so I help people because I want people to show up for me if I’m in trouble. If nobody steps up because they think someone else is going to do it, then nobody is going to do it. It has to start somewhere.”

‘Nobody owes me anything’

It wasn’t long before Nadine was not only rehanging, but rearranging the artwork, and organizing fence sections into themes. When a friend from Texas sent her a photo of the fence taken from the plaza, Nadine finally understood the power of the platform for which she had accidentally become a steward.

“First I would spend five minutes cleaning up, and then it was ten minutes and then it was days and then months.” She’d arrive around 10 pm each night and leave at 4 am—although there were plenty of days where I saw her at the fence both day and night—and she rarely took a full day off (in her estimate, she was only absent two days “for rest”).

Nobody asked her, but plenty of people were thankful for her service. When the fence finally came down, a decision was made—shepherded by Aliza Leventhal, a Library of Congress employee who documented the fence on her personal time, and with help from a few others and a grant from the Washington Conservation Guild—to rent a storage unit and preserve what they could. There have since been exhibitions in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at the Enoch Pratt Free Library and Amazing Grace Lutheran Church in Baltimore, and at D.C.’s Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library. Nadine hopes her story will get the attention of an institution interested in preserving the now-historic artifacts that most people were content to throw away.

She has taken on the majority of the storage costs herself while she works on forming a foundation and securing funding to properly maintain the increasingly-fragile artwork. “I take on stuff that nobody asks me to do,” she says. “That’s why I always say nobody owes me anything because anything I do, I decide to do it on my own. But if I die tomorrow, no one else knows how it all came together and how it’s all connected.”

Black Lives Matter Plaza, November 7, 2020

A colonized mind

Nadine was born at 10:30 p.m. on May 11, 1965, in Port of Spain General Hospital in Trinidad. She says she grew up in an “uber-dysfunctional family,” and would find out later in life that her older brother’s conception was the result of a date rape. Her father—a Black man with blue eyes—forced himself on her then-17-year-old mother, a Black woman whose Black mother was prone to making racially-disparaging remarks to her daughter and grandchildren.

Nadine now sees her difficult childhood as a result of two overlapping issues: the “colonized mind,” which she says is still common in countries like Trinidad (they gained their independence from Britain in 1962, but the consequences still ripple across generations), and her mother’s lack of options and bodily autonomy.

“It wasn’t easy,” Nadine says, choking back tears. “It wasn’t easy with people around you constantly telling you you’re not good enough—we were too dark, or had the wrong hair, or a too-broad nose—as a kid you’re taking it all in and you don’t know it, but then you encounter it again out in society. I felt like a burden.”

Although her father was “horribly abusive” to everyone, Nadine’s mother (whom she refers to as her “incubator”) had nowhere to run to so she stayed in the relationship—and ended up having two more children, which only made the situation worse for everybody.

“She was resentful, so I don’t fault her for wanting to get out,” Nadine says. “It wasn’t malicious, but she largely left us to fend for ourselves.”

Nadine cites this neglect as her personal connection to the pro-choice movement. At 59 years old, she says she may be too old to have children of her own, but she’ll never stop being angry with the dismal circumstances that led to her birth—even if it means entertaining the thought that she might never have been born at all.

“If my incubator had a choice, my life would have been different. Maybe I wouldn’t be here, but who cares? If she had access to abortion, she wouldn’t have wrecked the psyche of three other people. The repercussions [of her lack of choice] are still being felt today.”

‘America or bust’

Nadine describes her maternal grandmother as “a religious zealot who believed in a lot of nonsense,” including that the end of the world was imminent. As a result or this conditioning, Nadine grew up apathetic and aimless, thinking ‘Ok, if the world is coming to an end, what’s the point of doing anything?’”

She left her father’s house shortly after turning 18; months later, when he tried to bring her home by force—violently confronting her on a public street—she was rescued by a group of men whose unwanted advances she had rebuffed moments before. By the time she was in her early 20s, Nadine realized that “while the world may be coming to an end at some point, it’s not ending right now,” and she scrambled to find a purpose.

Nadine dressed as an illegal immigrant for Halloween, November 1, 2024

She got a coveted office job for the Trinidad government, but quickly realized it was a dead end. “The people who worked there had been there 20 years and they would boast about being there 20 years,” Nadine says. “But they were doing the same damn thing and I’m thinking to myself ‘Ain’t no goddamn way I will be here after 20 years.’”

Because her father worked for an airline, Nadine traveled to the U.S. frequently as a kid, flying free until she turned 18—but even if it hadn’t felt familiar, Nadine says there was never any question that she would end up in the U.S., a common aspiration among Trinidadians. “When I set my sights on getting an education, it was America or bust.”

She saved money, gave away everything she owned (keeping only some personal letters and a few dresses), secured a visa, arranged to stay with a cousin in New Jersey, and entered the U.S. on October 31, 1987. She was 22 years old. “I had no back up plan if they didn’t let me through,” Nadine says, insisting that she wasn’t scared of the journey because she had no other options.

“Did I come prepared? No,” she says.

“They’re eating the pets,” November 1, 2024

2nd class citizen

Although her life in the U.S. has been anything but easy, Nadine insists she’s been very lucky. “I don’t have financial luck—I have never been able to win money or anything like that—I have luck with circumstance.” But the obstacles she’s overcome suggest that more than luck is at play—and Nadine is clearly smarter than she admits.

She’s been consistently working since she was a teenager; her first job after she came to the U.S. was pulling plastic off of jackets ahead of the steamer at a Members Only factory. When she was transferred to the mending department, an older coworker would pass the workday by telling Nadine all of her personal problems and occasionally crying.

She was hired to be a home aide to an elderly woman and moved from majority-Black neighborhoods to white ones and back again with the help of newspaper ads in which she began to solicit opportunities instead of simply going whichever way the wind blew her. A job at a furniture store led to her first marriage (he was a customer).

Over the course of their contentious, years-long coupling, his carelessness got her suddenly evicted from an apartment and he cheated on her constantly. Their marriage may have been unstable but it was Nadine’s final hurdle to clear in her path to citizenship.

When I ask how long they were together, she says: “He started being a dog from day one—but I liked him and the sex was good. My relationship was genuine, but his needs superseded mine.” She got her green card, applied to be a citizen, and became one as soon as she was able. “I’m all good now,” she says. “Until Trump gets back in office and declares that I’m illegal, which could happen.”

And her first husband? “He was a dog and I couldn't put up with it any longer so I moved on.”

Decolonizing the mind

Although she insists she used to be really, really shy (and still detests banal small talk), it’s almost impossible not to notice Nadine wherever she sets her sights on attracting attention.

She doesn't approach or preach to people and prefers to let the curious come to her. She’s always willing to have a constructive conversation based in reality, but it’s not always been easy for her to recognize at first when she’s being purposely trolled. She cites a recent incident outside of the White House, when someone approached her and seemed to inquire earnestly about Project 2025. They asked her how they could find out more information and balked when she suggested Google.

“He says to me ‘... And I'm supposed to believe Google?’ I ended the conversation. We’re being coddled in this world where everybody’s opinion is supposedly on par—and it’s not. I won’t be a part of it. I will not hesitate to tell you if you ask a stupid question.”

She may be quick to tell it like it is, but that applies to praise as well as criticism. Nadine credits her third—and current—husband for breaking her out of the generational trauma bubble where she had been taught explicitly and implicitly by family members and society alike that “white is right.”

Before she was cognizant of her own bias, she admits to looking for—and elevating white men—above all others. “Fortunately for me, I found an asshole,” she says, showcasing her seemingly inexhaustible ability to make lemonade out of the lemons life keeps throwing at her.

She says she’s thankful that she met her “idiotic” husband and not a different white man who put her on a pedestal and treated her well enough to validate the damaging racial hierarchies she worked so hard to free herself from.

“Now everybody is just somebody who happens to be white, happens to be Black, happens to be East Indian, Asian, be whatever, and I'm dealing with you on that level—how you treat me is how I treat you,” Nadine says.

Going home

Lately, Nadine says that it’s begun to feel like her big American Dream might end up being a bust afterall: The world hasn’t ended (yet) but she’s found herself thinking about leaving the U.S.—even if she’s not quite sure where she would go next. She still has family in Trinidad, but she doesn’t think her decolonized mind would survive long there; she’s looked into Canada and Australia, but there are too many hoops to jump through.

Conversely, the stubborn part of her (she is a Taurus, after all) says “If I leave, they win. Right? Because it’s me that they want to go—a Black atheist immigrant—and if I leave, I'm giving them the win. So the stubborn part of me doesn’t want to go.”

Right now, she’s more concerned with where she’s going to spend election night. Earlier in the month, she told me she was trying to arrange a reunion of sorts at the new fence that encircles Lafayette Park in anticipation of election turmoil. But while we’re having our conversation on the grounds of the Capitol, a man walks by and recognizes her. He says he has a Howard University connection—does she want to spend Election Night at the Harris campaign party? She makes no commitments (“I prefer to be outside because I already made my banner,” she tells me), but gives him her phone number and seems pleased with the serendipity of it all. “See?” she says as she saves his contact. “I have situational luck.”

During the 2020 election, Nadine was holding court at the fence like she had done for so much of the six months preceding; only this time, she was surrounded by a crowd that grew larger and more energetic as they anxiously waited for several days to ensure every vote was counted.

In a photo I took on November 7—shortly after the Biden/Harris victory was reported—Nadine sits on a step ladder and leans against the artwork-covered fence. A large black-and-white sign looms above her. It says “You’re fired” (an Apprentice reference), but in my closely-cropped photo I read it as “tired,” because that’s how her blue-lined eyes look to me. She’s wearing a t-shirt that she designed in her signature cartoonish style; on the back it says “Flush the turd on November 3rd.” Each day that passed without results, she crossed out the date and wrote in a new one.

This time around, she’s not sure what she’ll do or where she’ll go if Trump secures a second term, but she is sure what she won’t be doing: protesting.

“If he wins, I’m not protesting again,” she says with conviction. “That’s my hard line. You had the whole of 2017, ‘18, ‘19, ‘20, ‘21, ‘22, ‘23, and now until November 5th, 2024, and you let him get back in there? No. I’m done. It would be hard. It would be very hard. But I’m done.”

When I agree that she has more than earned a break after the countless hours she has spent reminding passersby why immigrants like her have always made America so great, she is quick to clarify that she’s not looking for accolades—and admits that her not-quite-infinite well of patience may finally be drying up.

“I have done so much to get people’s attention,” she says. “We are the majority of this country. America has had enough time. America is willing to let people die again and again and still claim to be ‘pro-life?’ No. No. I want her to win, I want to be wrong. I so want to be wrong.”