Remembering is the rich currency of memory. A currency that deals solely in story, much like stitched together fragments of a person’s life after they have passed. Recalling a loved one’s words can help us form a picture of who they were and how they lived. Remembering serves as a connective thread, linking lineage, legacy, and identity between individuals, families, and communities, reminding us of who we are and where we came from. Remembering is a link to an object or idea, offering comfort, honing our will to persevere, or tapping our mettle. Remembering provides an abundance of knowledge, wisdom, and insight.

In Remembering: Resist, Reveal, Reclaim, the concept of remembering/recollection serves as the foundation for exploring concepts related to memory, identity, and social justice. Through images and text, the African American artists featured in this exhibition engage in a dialogue that examines the past, present, and future. Through visualized narratives, their artwork expresses resistance to the trauma and systemic oppression of history, revealing the mechanisms and mentality that perpetuate violence in order to reclaim their collective identities – in the pursuit of equality and self-determination.

Craft functions as agency and creative force - creating alternate histories that unravel the machinations of disenfranchisement and are employed to address omissions and erasures in history. Art and craft practices, as arbiters of truth and critical thinking, have long guided Black communities and other people of color in their struggles, and continue to do so. Artists carved, painted, hammered, and sewed images of dissent from memory, forming inquiries often too dangerous to articulate, yet necessary to regain freedom of self.

The artwork in this exhibition celebrates, challenges, guides, baffles, and questions not only the African American lived experience but also the human condition. Here, the pretty and the ugly of past and the present are offered. Yet, through the lens of creative vision, the past becomes informative and transformative. In these artists’ hands, present circumstances become the spring board toward a bright, limitless future.

The artists in this exhibition remind us that remembering is not merely about looking back, instead it is a twofold process that includes visioning. While memory probes what has gone before, visioning explores what is yet to come. This relationship between past and future is reminiscent of the Adinkra Sankofa symbol of the Akan people of Ghana in West Africa - a bird whose body faces forward, while its head reaches back to grasp a seed. The image symbolizes bringing past knowledge into the present to create a strong future. Remembering is an action that can take multiple forms, which are alluded to in the exhibition’s subtitle: Resist, Reveal, Reclaim. The artists and their artwork featured here challenge viewers to do just that. Rather than be passive participants in this artistic conversation, viewers are asked to engage with the artwork, concepts, and ideas presented in Remembering: Resist, Reveal, Reclaim. How is remembering a form of resistance to tragedy, limitation, and bias? How can remembering lift the veil of forgotten memory to reveal what has been hidden and even erased? How does remembering the people and places that brought us joy, laughter, and celebration enable us to reclaim our past and transform our future? Through creative expression, knowledge and wisdom, Remembering: Resist, Reveal, Reclaim gives visual voice to what has already transpired so that we can learn from the past, view our present with clarity and confidence, and move forward unencumbered. - Karlota Contreras-Koterbay & Dr. Cynthia Gadsden

Exhibiting artists include Omari Booker, Ashley Buchanan, Brittney Boyd Bullock, Lakesha Calvin, Kimberly Dummons, Eric Echols, Genesis The Grey Kid, Barbara Hodges, Leroy Hodges Jr., Edwin Jeffery, Carl Moore, Elisheba Mrozik, Althea Murphy-Price, Lorenzo Swinton, Gary White, and Donna Woodley.

The exhibition is co-curated by Karlota Contreras-Koterbay, Director of Slocumb Galleries at East Tennessee State University and Director of the Crafting Blackness Initiative, and Dr. Cynthia Gadsden, Associate Professor of Art History at Tennessee State University, whose research areas include the visual arts, the lived experience, and the ways knowledge is transferred across generations via culture, relationships, and story. This exhibition and related programming are funded in part by a grant from the Tennessee Arts Commission, Arts Fund of East Tennessee Foundation, In These Mountains from South Arts, Bravissima! Women Sponsoring the Arts, and Eastern Tennessee State University.

Exhibition Sponsors: