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 are 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.  

 

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