Erasure as a Decolonial Tool: Danielle De Jesus
The dollar bill has been customized—and politized. Danielle De Jesus, a Nuyorican, Bushwick-based visual artist, transforms U.S. currency—a symbol of capitalist power and control—into decolonial surfaces for memory, resistance, and community storytelling. In her ongoing series Paintings on U.S. Currency, she paints over George Washington’s face on the dollar bill. Challenging the dominant narratives the United States government has inscribed onto money, she replaces the president’s portrait with the Puerto Rican flag, a piragua seller, and other images from the artist’s everyday surroundings.
In one of De Jesus’s modified dollar bills, Carmelo, a middle-aged friend and neighbor, wears eyeglasses and a cap with a small pin representing the flag of Puerto Rico, hinting at his nationality. Since he looks downward, the viewer cannot distinguish his facial features. Hands clasped and body bent forward, his posture suggests hopelessness as he ponders an unexpected future, a victim of life circumstances outside of his control. His environment depicts the remains of a messy, fragile, and old home. The cream color of a tablecloth mixes with the dollar bill's original background, making it hard to see where one ends and the other starts. Just as the currency exchanges hands repeatedly—losing its freshness and brilliance—the room also has an essence of wear and tear.
De Jesus takes to social media to diffuse her art, critiques, and hopes. On a January 5, 2019, Instagram post, De Jesus explains the source for the piece featuring Carmelo. As gentrification changed their neighborhood, Carmelo faced eviction, “losing the little space he called home.” In an emotional account, De Jesus narrates how authorities threw his belongings into a dumpster and deprived him of being able to sleep under a roof. For months, the artist and her mom opened their home to him. Eventually, the city helped him find a place. Two months later, he passed away. His experience compelled De Jesus “to share the story of our struggles, our relationships, and our community in a way that only those who witnessed it can.”
This attention to personal narrative is not unique to Carmelo; the artist repeatedly draws on family and community to articulate larger sociopolitical critiques. On January 7, 2018, she posted a dollar bill portraying a relative and his wife in their “humble” Moca, Puerto Rico, home. In the artwork, an interpretation of Grant Wood’s 1930 American Gothic painting, the couple wears typical middle-class clothing. Their outfits are red, white, and blue—colors that represent the Puerto Rican flag. The man carries a rake, but the couple’s expressions aren’t as serious as in the original painting. In the background, there are palm trees, other tropical botanicals, and a house with unpainted plaster. Electric poles and wires are visible, but instead of a blue sky to fill the top half of the image, it’s the dollar bill.
De Jesus’s image captures a typical view of rural Puerto Rican middle and lower classes. On Instagram, the artist, part of the Diasporican community, included hashtags such as #CampesinoGothic (Spanish for Gothic Farmer) and #PostMaria, she alludes to the poverty background of many farmers on the archipelago and the devastating aftermath for agriculture after the passing of Hurricane Maria in September 2017. The Category 5 storm ruined farmers' crops and land, damaging the country's economy and directly affecting those who depended on agriculture.
Despite her specific viewpoint, it’s not just the social conditions affecting Puerto Ricans that De Jesus captures. Her work also engages with transnational solidarity, particularly in the case of Palestine. Acknowledging the colonial comparisons between Palestine and Puerto Rico, De Jesus assesses the struggles of both occupied countries. From settler capitalism to armed conflict, like in the municipality of Vieques, Palestine and Puerto Rico grasp for similar political and economic hopes and liberties and share an understanding of the violences that global superpowers enacted.
On November 1, 2023, De Jesus shared two $1 bills, one on top of the other. The top includes a portrait of Leila Khaled—a former militant and activist who was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—while the bottom presents Lolita Lebrón, a Puerto Rican nationalist leader, with her country’s flag. In 1954, Lebrón and three others fired shots into the U.S. House of Representatives and demanded full independence for Puerto Rico, which became a U.S. commonwealth two years earlier. On Instagram, De Jesus included a quote by Khaled that could apply to both nations: “Where there is repression, there is resistance.”
Portraits of Leila Khaled and Lolita Lebrón. Courtesy of Danielle De Jesus.
Luigi (2025) is the latest artwork of the Paintings on U.S. Currency series. On February 21, 2025, Luigi Mangione, a suspect in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, appeared in a New York City courtroom for his first hearing. Hyperallergic provided artist De Jesus access to the trial and a platform to present her first-hand narration of the hearing, including a portrait of Mangione on a dollar bill. His monochromatic image appears surrounded by a green background. The words “deny, defend, depose,” which the suspect inscribed on their ammunition, appear here in red, reframing the narrative from individual guilt to systemic complicity. The U.S. healthcare industry, worth billions, has a history of using tactics that can hurt people. As the Associated Press explains, “‘Delay, deny, defend’ has become something of a rallying cry for insurance critics. The terms refer to insurers delaying payment on claims, denying claims and defending their actions.”
De Jesus has a history of complicating public figures like Mangione, Khaled, and Lebrón. Rather than heroizing or condemning them, the artist positions their stories within a larger system of violence that criminalizes the poor, discards those who aren’t able-bodied, and protects corporate power. As a decolonial tool, erasure can critique colonial narratives. By removing, subtracting, or recontextualizing words or imagery from official documents—like maps, archival materials, and even money—we can challenge dominant histories and foster a space for marginalized voices. De Jesus inserts Diasporican iconographies into the very surface of the U.S. dollar. By exchanging the original image of the dollar bill for her depictions of social and cultural concerns, she transgresses the colonial and imperialist function of money and transforms the currency into an approach to alternative local visual culture.
A dollar bill is both a site of oppression and a medium of survival. In repurposing the dollar, a symbol of violence and necessity, De Jesus invites us to rethink the values we circulate daily. Her Paintings on U.S. Currency series is a matter of portraying her social and cultural concerns in an accessible manner. Through intimate depictions of her neighborhood and a strong and firm presentation on her opinions on international and local struggles, the artist removes the foreign, colonial power of the dollar bill. The object loses its commodity aura, replaced instead by an artivist impulse. She brings viewers along through a different mode of engagement, inviting emotion, memory and justice. Through an active political practice, De Jesus educates not only her community, but also colonizers and global audiences about structural inequality and the lived realities of poverty and displacement.