Small Towns, Black Lives

The Small Towns, Black Lives exhibition and catalogue include photographs combined with text and various archival materials. Small Towns, Black Lives is also a multimedia web based presentation that includes photography, text, archival documents, video, and audio materials.

During the summer of 1989, I visited a historically African American settlement known as Whitesboro, New Jersey, where I met Rev. George Thompson of the First Baptist Church. We spent several hours discussing the town and it’s origins. At the time I had not formulated the concept of this exhibition or even a notion that it would become a project that engaged some portion of my attention as an artist for more than 12 years. The exhibition included more than seventy prints as well as the publication of an exhibition catalog and the final version of the website mentioned above. The web site was launched in 2003 for the opening of the exhibition and was reviewed in the New York Times.