Abstract
This paper reflects on the community-driven process of developing “Say Their Names: Honoring Our Ancestors of Wilcox County, Alabama,” a photography exhibit based on 70+ images of African Americans living under the sharecropping regime of the early 1900s in the Black Belt region of Alabama. The exhibit addresses a lack of accessible African American photographic history in Wilcox County, particularly the historic unavailability of these photographs to the biological as well as cultural descendants of those pictured in them. This project grew out of a search by Virginia Thomas to find the names of those pictured in a photo album from UNC’s Southern Historical Collection. Upon traveling to the town where the images were first taken, Thomas met Betty Anderson, Founder and Executive Director of the Shoe Shop and Quilt Museum. Anderson and Thomas decided to curate an exhibit in the museum to see if locals could identify those in the photographs. Using high resolution reproductions of images from the archive at UNC Chapel Hill, this exhibit aims to counter the erasure of the historical lives and contributions of African Americans to Wilcox County, and to re-envision the use of archives that UNC collected in the early 1900s. This piece discusses the organic process of creating the exhibit, curation as a form of rapid-response, and seeing those who are pictured as image-makers and their loved ones as stewards of their archival futures.
Presenters
Virginia ThomasAssistant Professor, Women's and Gender Studies and Art History, Providence College, Rhode Island, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Photography, Oral-History, Black-Studies, Community-Driven-Research, Archives, Curation
