The New Frontier

1991 – 1999

The Chief’s Blankets played a major role in The New Frontier: Rebuilding the American Dream, a series she began two years later, in 1991. Another important motif—the shopping cart—emerged in Badgley Arnoux’s art, symbolizing the impact of homelessness in the Bay Area. She arranged to have 25 shopping carts donated to her studio, and worked with some of the unhoused to transform the shopping carts into richly painted covered wagons. Each cart seat flap holds the story of that person. In January 1992, Badgley Arnoux led a caravan of “covered wagon carts” from her Bryant street studio to the Civic Center to greet Frank Jordan, the then-new mayor, as a performative action. A circular installation of these carts was featured in In Out of The Cold, the inaugural exhibition at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 1993.