| Artist's Statement |
| In 2001, I began collecting vintage photo albums. Most of them have been purchased through online auctions and others were purchased at antique stores. After a couple of months of watching the online auctions, I realized that some participants would buy an album and then split apart the images in the album and re-sell them individually to make a larger profit. The women, men, and children are for the most part nameless and only now known by their auction id number and their seller’s quirky sign-on. The thought of families torn apart, albeit figuratively, and then sold to the highest bidder is very disturbing and repeats a very troubling part of history. Although I recognize my own complicity by participating in the auctions of my “ancestors,” I do feel that I am rescuing the albums (people) I can, from further disturbance. As I looked over the albums for the past couple of years, I was never quite sure how to, and if I should, incorporate them into my own artistic practice. In a quest to work with new materials, and because I never felt as I if was finding the right colors in fabric stores, I began hand-dying cotton fabric. The texture and the process finally felt right. I began the series with “Searching for Beulah (limit of disturbance)”, a series devoted to singular images of women of color. I continued the series with a focus on singular images of men in “Finding Authenticity (does anyone remember?)”. The series continued with chapters devoted to children called "Learning the Song (heart murmurs)". Since I have over twenty albums, I have a lot of imagery to sort through. The women and men in these images are strong and proud. The images are a celebration of the skin tones of people of color, from ebony to ivory, and everything from the spectrum in between. The images are quintessential and timeless. Except for the tell-tale signs of clothing and hairstyle, some of the photographs could have been taken eight days ago instead of 80 years ago. The images I worked with range from early twentieth-century tin types to polaroids; however, they are all similar in that popular culture does not use images like these as a historical referent for the “black” body. They are not caricatures and stereotypes. They are human. Their eyes twinkle with insight and intelligence as they gaze at the camera, dressed in their best, with hair perfectly coiffed. Pondering the images I have collected, I started to ask questions as I looked at these long-forgotten and abandoned people. What were their names? How long did they live? Where did they work? Were they religious? Who were their friends and lovers? And who were their enemies? Did they believe in Bunyan’s Beulah? Or, was Beulah the name of the cemetery where their great-grandmother was buried? Who disappointed them and discarded them like trash? And who did they truly trust and believe in? Unfortunately, I will never know the answers to my questions. And as one viewer reminded me, “That’s the beauty of the piece.” |