Mike and Sheila Forbes, Mill of Menie

Artist Bruce, Alicia Scottish, b. 1979

Date2010

MediumInkjet print

DimensionsImage: 39 1/2 x 32 1/2 in. (100.3 x 82.6 cm)

Credit LineMuseum purchase

Object number2023:315

About the ArtistAlicia Bruce, a photographer, activist, and educator, has dedicated more than a decade to documenting the local community of Menie, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Her monograph, I Burn But I Am Not Consumed, conveys picturesque dunes and the remote beauty of ancestral homelands, which have become an unlikely, worldwatched battleground between long-time community members and encroaching private development. The publication shows the environmental destruction and harassment of the town’s homeowners—resultant of Donald Trump’s intention to build “the greatest golf course in the world.” This image features local resisters Michael and Sheila Forbes, whom Bruce honored through a posed image referencing the famous painting American Gothic by Grant Wood (1930). The pair stands side-by-side and stoic in front of their farmhouse.