Collage: I began making the collages to explore my family narrative in relationship to Klein, that place. Images have come from photographs and ephemera that have been passed down of found. Initially, I was very focused on my great grandmother’s book in which she pasted articles, recipes, and other bits related to her life over her own minister and publisher father’s handwritten sermon notes and letters. My own work feels like a contribution to this palimpsest. Images of the house, inside and outside, and cemetery are another primary element. There are portraits of my ancestors and others associated with the place, along with some of my childhood when I was at Klein.

As I continued to work with a view to Choked on Cotton, I simplified each collage and used an image I had taken of a cotton field as the unifying feature. I considered more carefully what has been trapped by the plantation cotton economy over the generations. It is as though our Klein families, both black and white, have been caught in the currents of this sea of cotton: sometimes coming together and sometimes pushed apart.

Complicity, the work in the exhibit, juxtaposes the collage with “Our inheritance… My own complicity” written in vermillion with Witness, a drawing over a photograph of a cotton field near Klein that includes my shadow.