SOUTHERN WHITE AMNESIA
SOUTHERN WHITE AMNESIA is an ongoing body of work that examines my family’s role in the American exploitation of Black labor and the generational neglect that keeps it hidden. It’s my intention with this series to tell my family’s narrative through quilting, with all the complexity that history holds and the present demands.
SOUTHERN WHITE AMNESIA currently is a 10-piece collection that explores how individual histories form into larger collective identities. It includes quilts that operate as alternative calendars, challenging conventional perceptions of time, and reinterpreted church banners from my Southern Baptist upbringing. SWA also includes a topographic quilt depicting an old South Carolina burial-ground where my ancestors lay buried next to the people they enslaved. There’s a quilted family-tree laying bare the generational connection between slavery, wealth, and access to education. I often draw from traditional quilt language—incorporating time-honored blocks like Sunbonnet Sue, for example—to critique White America’s historical reluctance to examine the past. The collection culminates with a video-quilt installation using AI-enhanced video vignettes of my ancestors, enslavers and children of enslavers, blinking calmly at the camera, prodding the viewer to engage with the complex narratives these videos portray.
SWA seeks to bring history to light in order to inform present action. I like to think of these pieces adding to the conversations of Kara Walker, Bisa Butler, Angela Ellsworth, and most recently, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, whose Unburied Sounds reminds us that there are still undetonated American bombs deep in the soils of Vietnam, mirroring the unaddressed legacies in our own domestic history.