Tarnishing Till the End of Transgressions

2021

graphite; watercolor; illustration pens; black, white, and blue India ink; ebony wood stain; and wheat-pasted tracing paper

26x29 1/2x4 1/4in.

I took a trip the previous year to walk the site of the Bryant Store in Money, Mississippi to make this work in remembrance of Emmett Till. What remains of Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market has been purposefully left to decay and is engulfed by the surrounding nature. The decay was so bad that the work is actually of a side of the store instead of the face which has completely fallen in. It was recommended that I make the trip and visit the site in person to grasp the full weight of the crumbling structure and see where the event leading up to Emmett Till’s kidnapping and murder began. After taking the trip, seeing the ruins, and learning why the site was left this way; I was more interested in how history was repeating itself. The current store owners are descendants of some of the jurors that acquitted Till’s murderers. The store is being left to rot in the hopes of taking its racist past with it. Emmett Till’s story was never taught in any school I attended and it was only by visiting the store, developing my own questions, and finding the answers that I could know the full history. But what if there’s eventually no site to visit? How will some of the present generation as well as the new educate themselves if there’s nothing preserved? While there are online resources, unnecessarily leaving this site to be forgotten will only water-down Emmett Till’s death. I bring up the aspect of history repeating itself because this is happening at the same time as some states are attempting to stop schools from teaching racism because it would give America a bad name. These “uncomfortable” parts of American history should be staples of every school curriculum in order for us to recognize early on how truly ugly the ideas of bigotry and racism really are so we can understand destabilized communities, fracture families, and the friend or loved-one we’ll never see or speak with again. Some of the building’s decay reminded me of my earlier work more than my machine visuals. Violence against African-Americans is obviously still happening, but the fact that it is still happening is just as much of a problem as the violence itself. As violence and discrimination continues to occur there are now attempts to wipe such acts under the rug in order to make them seem as if they’re just isolated incidents instead of part a longstanding campaign of institutionalized genocide.