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A Palimpsest Memory

A Palimpsest Memory asks how historical memory is archived and passed on, suppressed, or lost entirely. This body of work is the result of years of research into slaveholding in my ancestry and reflects my frustration with the silences in the archive surrounding this history. As Saidiya Hartman has written, “The irreparable violence of the Atlantic slave trade resides precisely in all the stories that we cannot know and will never be recovered.”[1]  

 

As a white artist grappling with this legacy of dehumanization and erasure, I want to expose the histories held in archival spaces that privilege and perpetuate lineages of white wealth and power. Many archival spaces have willfully omitted and often erased the histories and narratives of people of color, especially enslaved communities, by failing to recognize, catalog, and collect the histories of people of color. This body of work exposes the elision of Black voices, personal accounts, records, and narratives as they relate to my ancestry. I cannot restore their lost voices and experiences, but the written remnants of this history— such as 19th-century deeds and trusts belonging to my family, as well as personal letters and journals—reveal trace evidence of Black enslaved lives embedded in coldly bureaucratic and transactional language. Locating and following these traces has become central to my work.  

 

Imprinting text from primary source documents found in my family’s archives in California and Tennessee into clay and paper, I create a counter-archive that exposes the history of slaveholding, dating back to 1619, rooted within my family tree. In the interest of transparency and historical context, throughout this exhibition I have chosen to keep the original language used in the primary source documents, even when it is traumatic and harmful. 

 

The family story that is my inheritance is part of a larger narrative about the desire of many Americans to erase or deny such legacies. This erasure and occlusion as key to American culture’s present-day cognitive dissonance around racism in its many forms, including brutality against people of color and enduring structural inequalities.  

 

This project is supported, in part, by a grant from the Center for Humanities & the Arts. 

 

[1] Saidiya Hartman. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14.

Between Letter's Lines
Between Lineage Lies
Scraping the Surfacer

2024

Fabric tracing paper, leather, diaries and letters of Joseph G. Eastland and Thomas B. Eastland, steel posts, copies of micro filmed 19th century land deeds and trusts

These books contain copies of the historical documents used for the exhibition’s two works. One contains copies of the microfilm of 19th-century land deeds and trusts that were traced to make the tiled piece, Below the Surface. The other two contain reproductions of letters and travel diaries written by Thomas B. Eastland and Joseph Green Eastland, as they traveled across the country with Dow. (The original documents currently reside in the collections of the California Historical Society.) In keeping with the rest of the exhibition, the original text from the 1800s is presented unedited to provide cultural context and transparency, even though it is traumatic and harmful. The QR code below and in the handout provide digital access to these documents and additional primary resources uncovered in my research. By making the documents more accessible, the work invites critique of the archive itself.   

  

As writer and theorist Christina Sharpe says, “How does one memorialize chattel slavery and its afterlives, which are unfolding still? How do we memorialize an event that is still ongoing?” This work is part of a larger, ongoing interrogation by artists and scholars into how American history is remembered.   

  

Thank you to Lindsay Vance, Thomas Yi, Pierce Kandcer, Ella Marshall, and Philip Vittetoe for their assistance making these books. 

2024

Stoneware, Tennessee ball clay, 19th century land deeds and trusts, 3M double hook Velcro, nails

 

Mapping a section of White County, Tennessee, the ceramic tiles that compose this work are embedded with land deeds and trusts connected to the Eastland family, who owned a large portion of the county. Enslaved Black men, women, and children were often used as payment in these land transactions. The jagged lines cutting through the piece represent a former railroad – now a street called Old Railroad Grade Road – and what is now called Clifty Creek.  During my research, I heard about burial grounds of the enslaved who were forced to build this stretch of railroad tracks in the early 1800s along the street. This piece exposes the whitewashing of history, the violent division of land in this region through paper transactions that enabled the buying and selling of Black people as currency, the forced labor building the railroad, and the subsequent absence of voices of people of color from the historical records.

 

With this work, I recognize the enslaved Black men, women, and children who were forced to give their blood, sweat, and lives in the building of this railroad to further the westward expansion of colonialism.

 

 

2024

Paper, wood dowels, thread, letters and travel diaries of Joseph G. Eastland and Thomas B. Eastland.

 

From 1847 to 1853, Joseph Green Eastland and his father, Thomas B. Eastland – my third and fourth great-grandfathers respectively - wrote extensive letters and travel diaries, including documentation of their journey in 1849 from Nashville, Tennessee to San Francisco, California in pursuit of gold and commerce. These materials are in the collections of the California Historical Society (CHS).  Accompanying them was a Black man named Dow, who was enslaved by my ancestors. He was deeded to Thomas B. Eastland by his father-in-law, Joseph Green, in 1849.

 

When the trio reached San Francisco that year, the Eastlands hired Dow out for pay at a “coffee shop,” likely a space for drinking and gambling. Dow was around 30 years old at the time. While no written record of his personal thoughts or feelings appears to have survived in the historical record, we know he was gifted in learning languages, as he is credited by the Eastlands as quickly learning Spanish; we also know he was married, as it was mentioned in one of the Eastland’s letters, which originally enclosed a letter from Dow to his wife. It is unknown what happened to Dow, his wife, or his letters, which, unlike the Eastland letters, weren’t preserved at the CHS. These fragments of information about Dow are found within the letters and travel diaries of the two Eastlands, which I have embossed onto the paper in the work. The carbon-traced sections indicate where Dow is mentioned in the Eastland’s writings.

 

I have chosen to keep the original language used in the primary source documents from the 1800s to provide cultural context and to tell history as transparently as possible, even when it is traumatic and harmful.

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