The American artist Joe Zucker was perhaps best known for introducing an unusual material and technique in his “cottonball” paintings. After dipping cotton into Rhoplex, a thick acrylic binder, Zucker applied the balls to an underlying drawing on canvas. Zucker’s method was at first a visual enticement, but in paintings like University of Virginia Law School (1976), the material takes on inherent connotations related to America’s agricultural history. In the painting, the neoclassical facade of Old Cabell Hall at the University of Virginia, with its straight lines and mathematical structure, conflict with the vibrant relief and textural look of the cotton balls. The university’s buildings which were designed by Thomas Jefferson were originally built with enslaved black laborers, whose work in fields and cotton gins is also referenced by Zucker’s chosen material. The artist’s “reconstruction” paintings of that period, including Paying Off Old Debts (1975), are a reminder of America’s founding on capital and extraction.