2023
Hand sewing + embroidery and machine sewing on photo-printed cotton
TRACING AN ATROCITY // Photographing and sewing atop sites of conscience and atrocity
This work is guided by the question “how have landscapes bore witness to atrocity over time?” I’ve crisscrossed the United States for years, stopping to photograph landscapes of massacre and atrocity. It’s a pull that has been inexplicable and ongoing.
I have been sitting with those images, meditating on the vestigial emotion and energy held by land and structures over time. Working with each of these images affords me time to hold space while researching atrocities that have occurred throughout the United States over swaths of time. The additional element of sewing and embroidering each piece allows a space of continued reflection. Often intricate and messy.
This work is tangible and meant to be held and felt by the audience, encouraging them to ask the same guiding question. It is an ongoing project, updated as each piece is completed.
The Murder of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. August 9, 2014.
The terrorist booming of the 16th Street Baptist Church by white racist terrorist group in Birmingham, Alabama. Four girls — Addie Mae Collins (age 14, born April 18, 1949), Carol Denise McNair (age 11, born November 17, 1951), Carole Rosamond Robertson (age 14, born April 24, 1949), and Cynthia Dionne Wesley (age 14, born April 30, 1949)— were murdered in the attack. September 15, 1963.
Shooting and serious injury of Jacob Blake by police officer Rusten Sheskey in Kenosha Wisconsin. August 23, 2020.
Cherokee removal fort, the last standing blockhouse on the Trail of Tears. In 1830, Congress passed Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act, and these blockhouses served as holding cells and relocation camps for Cherokees along the death march. Fort Marr, Tennessee.
This Dahlnega area in what is now Georgia, was part of the Cherokee nation. The 1828 discovery of gold was the major impetus for the creation of the Cherokee Removal / Trail of Tears. Cherokee people were forcibly and violently removed off of their ancestral lands.
The largest enslaved uprising/revolt was planned on this plantation ground, in 1811 in what was known as the German Coast Uprising. Charles Deslonde, who is believed to have born into slavery in Louisiana, led this uprising. Organized by word of mouth along the river plantations south of New Orleans, rebels met and marched with limited firearms, carrying banners and demanding freedom. Militia members brutally killed and dismembered members of the uprising, putting heads on sticks along the Mississippi River to invoke fear of organizing another uprise. Woodland Plantation, Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana.
The grave of James Earl Chaney, in Meridian, Mississippi. Chaney was a civil rights activist and member of Congress of Racial Equality. He and fellow civil rights workers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were brutally murdered in Philadelphia, MS by members of the KKK. This gravestone continues to be toppled, defaced, and shot.
Haymarket Square in Chicago, home of the Haymarket Riot/Massacre/Affair. On May 4, 1886, an unknown person three a dynamite bomb at a peaceful rally to support labor and the 8 hour work day. Gunfire and violence ensued, severn police officers and at least four civlians were killed, and dozens of others were wounded. Eight anarchists were charged, four of whom were hanged. This event is the origin of International Workers Day, and the climax of working class unrest known last he Great Upheaval.
Little Rock Central High School, where nine African American students (The Little Rock Nine) enrolled to integrate in 1957. With Arkansas National Guard on the premies to keep the peace, the year aftermath comprised violence enacted by many white students, including throwing acid into student Melba Pattillo's eyes.
Unitarian minister James Reep was assassinated on this city block in Selma, Alabama on March 11, 1965. Reeb went to Alabama as a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to take part in the Selma to Montgomery March and subsequent protests. After eating dinner at an integrated restaurant in Selma with two other ministers, he was attacked by white racists with clubs, and eventually went into a coma and died two days later from his injuries. The four men charged with his murder were acquitted by an all-white jury.
The Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. The site of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr on April 4, 1968.
The Ludlow Massacre was the culminating event of Colorado Coalfield War, the National Guard killed striking miners en masse. The attack took place on the morning of Greek Orthodox Easter, April 20, 1914. While union strikes, and massacres, were not uncommon during this time, the Ludlow massacre was the first of its kind when women and children were murdered.
NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers was assassinated outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi by KKK member Byron De La Beckwith. Beckwith shot Evers in the back with a rifle, as he exited his car to enter his home and greet his wife and three children.
The Memorial Day massacre of 1937, was a labor massacre where Chicago Police shot and murdered 10 unarmed demonstrators during the Little Steel strike at the Republic Steel Company.
The Mother Rudd Home is the oldest building in the Warren Township of Illinois, and was a stop on the Underground Railroad a mere hundred feet rom the Des Plaines river. Located Gurnee, Illinois, this home bore witness to enslaved people seeking liberation in Canada, provided safe shelter and food.
The city of Norco is located along the Mississippi River 25 miles west of New Orleans in an area rife with environmental racism, colloquially known as Cancer Alley. The Shell Plant explosion of 1973 in Norco, Louisiana in the predominately Black neighborhood of Diamond where former sharecroppers had settled. A leaking underground Shell pipeline ignited, killing Leroy Jones and Helen Washington. There is no record the fatalities nor is there record of the murderous explosion in the Shell Norco Museum.
Four lives were lost in the Selma to Montgomery Marches: Jimmie Lee Jackson, Reverend James Reeb, Viola Liuzza and Jonathan Daniels. Pastor and nonviolent civil rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson was murdered by police in Marion Alabama. James Reeb was murdered by KKK members after eating at an integrated restaurant in Selma. Jonathan Daniels put his body in front of Ruby Sales as a policeman shot and killed him, both has just been released from jail for protesting labor exploitation of Black workers. Viola Liuzza was shot and murdered by KKK members on this stretch of highway as she drove a Black man home from the march.
On July 5, 2016, Alton Sterling was shot and killed by two Baton Rouge Police Department officers, Blane Salamoni and Howie Lake II, in front of the Triple S Food Mart where he was selling cds. Both officers had previous accounts of using aggressive and lethal force.
In 1887, African-American cane workers in Thibodaux, Louisiana attempted to organize. On November 23, a mass shooting at the hands of ex-confederate soldiers, prominent white citizens and racist militia groups left approximately 60 of those strikers dead. Bodies were dumped in an unmarked grave- underneath this soil- while the white press cheered a victory against a fledgling black union.
Here in Tuskegee, Alabama between 1932 and 1972, The United States Public Health Service and the Center for Disease Prevention conducted a study known as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Investigators enrolled 600 African American sharecroppers- 399 of whom had syphillis and 201 men who did not. PHS did not inform men of their condition, nor did they treat it with penicillin that was readily available. This experiment was blatant violation of ethical standards and cited by scholars as "arguably the most infamous biomedical research study in U.S. history."