Reveal and Restore: Difficult History through Art

Neill-Cochran House Museum

Austin, Texas

January 12-May 15, 2022

As I consider the title, Reveal and Restore, now, Reveal and Reckon would be more accurate. Restoring what was revealed is definitely not our intent.

The exhibit focuses on the Wallace House, the plantation home of my ancestors that is now a non-profit space for racial healing and reconciliation through the arts and 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 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 also speaks to my own journey as a daughter of the South and as an artist. The exhibit includes work I made about growing up in Birmingham AL during segregation 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 2020, 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. The video of the talk addresses Land as Persona: My Journey as an Artist and is foundational to this exhibit.