My Complicity

The My Complicity installation is composed of three works: the sculpture Roots, the collage Our Inheritance My Own Complicity, and Witness. This installation documents my struggle to understand my personal relationship to my heritage that culminated in my accepting my own complicity in my family history of slavery and racism. Photograph by Nash Baker.

Roots

This sculpture includes decaled imagery of women in family, decaled images of my mother’s chromosomes, and china-painted symbols including trees with roots, chromosomes, eyes, and stars and spirals. I had started the original head before Hurricane Harvey flooded my studio, and it sat as incomplete greenware in a damp box until I discovered it in 2018. I fired it in this form; the back is very rough and there is a hole in the top of the head where it was unclosed. I then glazed it with the surface decoration described above. I felt that Roots fit right with the the Our Inheritance My Own Complicity collage and Witness, both created in 2020, to form the My Complicity installation.

Our Inheritance My Own Complicity

Our Inheritance My Own Complicity is one of a series of collages In which I reflect on my Klein heritage . This one includes a line drawing of Klein cut into pieces, portraits of my mother and her brothers, my grandparents and great grandparents, and a line drawing taken from Birth of a Nation, all embedded in images of cotton fields on the place. Henry Walthall, my grandfather’s first cousin who was educated by my great grandmother at Klein, was the male lead in this film that was the impetus for the rebirth of the KKK. Writing the words Our Inheritance My own Complicity in vermillion over the collage, was an important moment for me in taking ownership of this fraught heritage.

Witness

Witness is one of a series of photographs of Klein and the surrounding area that include a line drawing of a figure, often myself, as here.