The title of this exhibit
weaves three threads of thought. On one thread I was
thinking about invisibility and race. I read, and copied onto handmade paper the text
of the novel ‘Invisible Man’ by Ralph Ellison, about the many ways a black man can be rendered invisible in society. Another thread was about racism invisible to
the ones who hold it. They either deny
that it exists in them or really don’t see it.
The third thread was about nostalgia, the kind that looks back on
pleasant memories while overlooking brutal history and racial injustice. Nostalgia in the white South is a feature
that is familiar to me.
I look back fondly on family dinner table arguments. I valued our ability to talk about issues of
the time even though they contained sentences like “society is not ready for
integrated swimming pools yet”. I could
disagree without feeling the kind of despair and outrage that I feel today over
yet another black body shot or incarcerated. Can the one be implicated in the
other? Does nostalgia contain an
abeyance of responsibility?
I look back to memories like watching heavy rain through
dark green trees surrounding my grandmother's screened porch
in Atlanta. In a drawer somewhere is a letter proudly describing a long
ago cousin who rode with the Red Shirts and how he raced on horseback to vote
in three different polling places to help install Wade Hampton as governor of
South Carolina in 1876. Both of my parents were born and brought up in South Carolina. My great
grandmother’s sisters sewed for the Red Shirts.
I grew up with these stories.
The work of this exhibit uses paper I made from the pulp of my
grandmother’s journals. The text of ‘Invisible Man’ pushes its way
into this paper toward an undulating water stain. On the opposite wall more
papers hang from a tatted thread. They are weighted with small scrolls bearing
texts of South Carolina slave narratives. The wistful beauty of the paper
bears scars barely hinted. Much hangs in the balance.
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| detail, from chapter 4 |
Artist Statement, as mounted in the exhibit.
The soil of South Carolina has a place in my soul. To make peace with the South and my whiteness I have dug into layers of sentimentality tilled into the garden of family stories. Nostalgia can be dangerous. The sentimentality of the “Lost Cause” blurred the brutal foundations of the Southern economy. I think of a great great-grandfather who farmed the soil of the old South. I think about the soils of land and property, ownership of land and ownership of human beings. I conflate the words ‘soil’ and ‘soul’ in a reflection of the tangle of affections and cruelties embedded in the heritage of the American South. My emotional landscape with regard to my family’s legacy is fraught with contradictions just as America’s landscape is fraught with injustices. Healing will require tilling through thick layers of white nostalgic sentiments and turning under ingrained crops of racial animus. We must explore the present character of racist thinking before we can grow new crops and new possibilities.
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‘INVISIBLE MAN’ Series
Text from Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" is written to the edge of a water stain on paper made from a southern matriarch's pulped journals
The Southern heritage is mine. The journal shreds in the paper are my grandmother's. The inherited repercussions of slavery and racism belong to America as a whole. .
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| "Uncle Mad" detail |
The note, in my grandmother's handwriting, reads:
From the left Ann, Libby, Kitty Lewis, "Uncle Mad", Billy & Robert Lewis.
In the back of Uncle Mad is our cook's (Clara Johnson) brother Tom (I think) who helped in the garden.
We were listening as Uncle Mad (age ?) played the accordion and told us about being born a slave & who were the kind masters and who were not.
The little hanging scrolls each represent one of the 285 slave narratives collected in South Carolina during the Works Progress Administration’s Writers Project in the late 1930’s.
'Prayers and Debts'
The little hanging scrolls each represent one of the 285 slave narratives collected in South Carolina during the Works Progress Administration’s Writers Project in the late 1930’s.
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