The Ties That Bind: Legacy

The Ties That Bind: Lineage

Summary:
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."