SOUTHERN WHITE AMNESIA
SOUTHERN WHITE AMNESIA is an ongoing body of work that examines my family’s role in the American exploitation of Black labor and the generational neglect that keeps it hidden. It’s my intention with this series to tell my family’s narrative through quilting, with all the complexity that history holds and the present demands.
SOUTHERN WHITE AMNESIA is a collection of quilts and textile installations that examines how white Americans reckon with—or fail to reckon with—their families' roles in slavery and its ongoing legacy. Through traditional quilting techniques subverted for contemporary discourse, the artist explores their own family history as enslavers in South Carolina and Kentucky, creating works that range from a topographic burial ground quilt to AI-enhanced video installations of ancestral portraits. Using worn textiles, traditional patterns like Sunbonnet Sue, and the symbolic language of Southern Baptist church banners, these pieces invite viewers to consider how individual histories form collective identity.
The collection aims not only to expose hidden histories but to probe deeper questions about inheritance, responsibility, and repair in contemporary America. I like to think of these pieces adding to the conversations of Kara Walker, Bisa Butler, Angela Ellsworth, and most recently, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, whose Unburied Sounds reminds us that there are still undetonated American bombs deep in the soils of Vietnam, mirroring the unaddressed legacies in our own domestic history.