Reliquary For Strange Fruit
This installation addresses one of the more disturbing aspects of the violence against Black people—the taking and keeping of souvenirs. Members of lynch mobs would fight over, sell, and purchase keepsakes—cuttings of the rope and wood from the lynching tree, ashes of burned bodies, pieces of their clothing, and even body parts (fingers, toes, ears, teeth, lips, hair, genitalia), including slices of organs for cooking and eating. This horrifying practice was not something the perpetrators tried to hide. Instead, it was such a festive occasion that they included their children and documented it. There are newspaper articles with eyewitness accounts describing the grotesque fanfare, advertisements of the tokens for sale, and lynching postcards with photographic evidence sold, shared, and distributed through the U.S. postal service. The inscription on one postcard from a son to his parents reads, “This is the barbecue that we had last night.” Because there were nearly 5,000 lynchings (documented) during the 80 years between 1817–1968, there were countless souvenirs taken and saved. Today, there are containers in attics and basements with tokens of Black death. How do the spirits of those tortured souls rest when pieces of their bodies are still tucked away and being passed down in white families? Short of collecting every remnant and giving them their proper rites, how can they be given honor? This installation is an offering to all those souls, named and unnamed—a last rite for restoring those spirits to wholeness and a visual prayer that they rest in peace.
This collection of era-specific containers holds relics of lynching souvenirs in effigy: a photo of a thousand-plus lynch mob, a rope segment, vintage cloth, ashes, soil (from Fruitvale BART Station, where Oscar Grant met a similar fate), hair, dogwood tree sticks (a famed lynching tree), fingers, toes, ears, and teeth. The containers and body parts have a golden anointing to consecrate them. Inscriptions on the shelves read, “You are precious,” as a reclamation and a simple psalm to offer the spirits. As a whole, this reliquary (a place to keep spiritual objects) lets the martyrs tell their stories and uses art as a spiritual ritual.
Light As A Feather
Living through the violent oppression of both Ida B. Wells’s time and today is, as Baldwin wrote: "To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost all of the time." Somehow, Black people have also always found ways to alchemize their suffering, becoming productive architects of this country and even creating (musical genres, exquisite foods, essential inventions, etc.) all within the throngs of chaos. Yet, trauma and chronic stress have very real consequences for physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health. In ancient Egypt, to pass into the afterlife, one’s heart had to weigh as light as a feather. Carved on the walls of the temple of Osiris is Spell #35, which is translated: "Oh my heart that I have had when on earth, do not stand up against me, do not make a case against me beside the great god."
This drawing of an anatomical heart has wings composed of traced hands, representing the many incarnate experiences that must be transcended, and is haloed with gold leaf. The winged heart is a visual touchstone, a reminder to keep our hearts as light as a feather so that, no matter our suffering, we may live with a free spirit in good health—and that we may pass with ease and rest in peace when our days are done.
Not So Ancient History: One Family Spanning Decades
Not So Ancient History: My Grandma And Harriet Tubman Lived 7 Years Apart
These infographic timelines offer a visual answer to the common questions about why talk of slavery and the civil rights movement matters—since it is “ancient history”—because it is actually very recent history that is still at work today. My grandmother and Harriet Tubman lived 7 years apart, and when Harriet Tubman died, Ronald Reagan (the president during my childhood) was 2 years old. If a grandparent was born in 1880 (as Ida B. Wells was just beginning her life’s work), then they can easily have grandchildren who turned 80 years old in 2020, meaning that the history from Jim Crow to COVID-19 occurred in the span of one family—grandparent, child, grandchild. All the beliefs and ways of being of that Jim Crow-era grandparent had a direct impact on their grandchild, who was an architect of the modern era and is easily still walking around today—whether oppressor or oppressed. Knowledge of the “not so ancient” past is crucial to understanding and informing our lives and choices today.
Mirror, Mirror
The process of unearthing the past, reflecting on the present, and visioning the future inevitably makes one think about oneself within this complex context. These mirrors offer an opportunity for reflection. The first has a quote by James Baldwin—“It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go to avoid a truthful mirror.” It offers a moment of pause, to caution against a powerful root cause of both the violent oppression of the perpetrators and the denial that sometimes plagues the oppressed—a lack of self-knowledge and self-reflection. The second has a quote by Ruha Benjamin—“Remember to craft and imagine the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within.” It places all that was unearthed in the exhibition in a constructive context, giving viewers an opportunity to put what they have learned and experienced to use in a balanced way, by reminding them to amplify the positive as they work to stop the negative.
The Ties That Bind: Legacy
The Ties That Bind: Lineage
The title of this diptych has its origin in two references—the 1782 hymn "Blest Be the Tie That Binds," written by British theologian John Fawcett after he and his family declined a promotion to a large church in favor of remaining in the impoverished spiritual community they had bonded with, as well as a quote/motto by artist/activist Lilla Watson and the Indigenous Australian rights collectives she worked with: "If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."
The Ties That Bind: Legacy uses the motif of white American Reconstruction/Jim Crow-era portraits to illuminate the link between the racialized violence of the past and the present. It asks us to consider the effect of racism on the perpetrators, as each photo emphasizes phrases of a Baldwin quote: "People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster. "It punctuates said denial with the name of a Black person from modern times whose life was cut short by racism—something that should be seen as just an antiquated fallacy of the distant past. The repercussions of this willful monstrousness are evident today in name after name of each Black life taken by the legacy of racism passed down from one generation to the next, thereby making a visual connection between the past and the present. The background of each piece has an excerpt of a real lynching scenario, and the foreground has an offering for the soul whose life was taken. Some pieces are further marked with a Zora Neale Hurston quote—"If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it,"—alluding to the importance of allowing those names to tell their stories. The last piece is literally tied (with a noose-like red thread) to the Lineage piece.
The Ties That Bind: Lineage explores alternative meanings for the message of intertwined liberation. The tintype of a Black Jim Crow-era family is anointed with the Adinkra symbols Hye Won Hye ("that which does not burn"), symbolizing imperishability and endurance, and Akofena, the "sword of war," symbolizing courage and valor.
From generation to generation, Black people need to understand our history and the stories of our ancestors/elders, but there are other ways in which all of our community/collective experiences are passed down to us—through the ovum overlap (the eggs of a female fetus are present in utero, meaning a pregnant mother’s experiences are affecting both her growing baby and the potential grandchildren in her baby’s womb). So both trauma and resilience can be inherited. The family continuum is surrounded by a visual and literary affirmation of the fact that we are cosmic beings made of stardust (and greater than the limitations placed on us), emphasized by a Fanon quote: "I am Black. I am the incarnation of a complete fusion with the world... an abandonment of my ego in the heart of the cosmos... I am Black, not because of a curse, but because my skin has been able to capture all the cosmic effluvia."