Red Summer is a photo-based project which surveys the sites of race riots and race conflicts between 1917 and 1923. The locations in this project are not meant to be comprehensive, however, they are offered as a broad sample of the post World War I race conflict in the U.S. A very simplified view of the causes can be divided into three categories of particular concern for my project; growing African American response to decades of lynching, labor conflicts stemming from the mass immigration of white European labor and the mistreatment of Black veterans that returned home to second class status in a segregated and biased society.
The Manifest portfolio images are photo-based representations of objects, documents, photographs, and books made in various public and private collections throughout the U.S. These repositories encompass elements of material culture such as diaries, slave collars, human hair, a drum, souvenirs, and other objects, some with great significance and others simply quotidian representations of daily life, from the history of the African American community.
Schools for the Colored is an extension of the ideas that formed the project Small Towns, Black Lives, in that; it is a continuation of my journey through the African American landscape. In <strong>Schools for the Colored</strong> I began to pay attention to the many structures and sites (also making photographs of places where segregated schools once stood) that operated as segregated schools.
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.
7 Steps to Freedom was a commissioned public art project for the Salem County Cultural & Heritage Commission. This project was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.
http://7stepstofreedom.wordpress.com
The photographs in this project were made in the African Hebrew Israelite community of Dimona, Israel. It was established more than 35 years ago by a group of African Americans from the Chicago area. They left the U.S. in the late 1960’s, lived in Liberia for more than two years, and settled in Israel’s Negev desert. The images in this portfolio describe various aspects of daily life.