January 12 - May 15, 2022
From Neill-Cochran House Museum:
“Reveal and Restore: Difficult History Through Art focuses on the Wallace House, once a plantation, and today owned and programmed by Klein Arts & Culture. In the specificity of this place, we can view the arc of the American South from the conquest of the Muskogee Creek Nation to enslavement and the rise of the cotton economy, through emancipation, reconstruction, and the rise of Jim Crow, to the present time in which Black and white descendants of the place have come together to create a new narrative.
The exhibit speaks to my own journey as a daughter of the South and as an artist. It includes work I made about growing up in Birmingham AL during segregation and Jim Crow that brought me into discussions about the appropriation of Black experience and pain. The majority of the work presented relates to my experience of childhood summers spent in the ancestral home with my grandmother, in which I absorbed the ideology of the Lost Cause, took “mud baths “ in the red clay, swam in the creeks and found arrowheads in the fields. The ancestors were clearly present in the house and in my ideation. One column on the 2nd floor porch had names written in pencil from a long-ago house party, including that of Henry Walthall, whose role as Ben Cameron (the little Colonel) in Birth of a Nation was the stuff of family legend. It was subsequently painted over, becoming a secret of the house, joining the hiddenness of the house’s foundation in enslavement and violence.
In March 2021, I gave a talk for the Houston Chapter of the National Council of Jewish Women: Building for Social Justice: Reversing a Family Plantation Legacy. I described how my experience growing up in the Jim Crow South had influenced my art and then, in turn, my work with the Wallace House influenced my art practice.”
2310 San Gabriel Street
Austin, 78705 Texas
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