Top left: Alex Callender, History Constructs the House that Sometimes Holds Us, 2020, fabricated wall covering, wood, acrylic paint, and mixed media on paper
Bottom left: Wendel White, Door Knob, Maye St Julien, Eatonville Historic Preservation, Eatonville, FL, pigment inkjet print, from the series Manifest
Right: Sarah Stefana Smith, Ten Forms Make a Village, 2019, Bird netting, aluminum siding, projection
After Archives
A.P.E. GALLERY, NORTHAMPTON, MA, MARCH 3 - 30, 2023
What happened between or out of or in the holes of the story is the real story…
-Lauren Russell, Descent
Traditional archives – of documents, images, objects – are commonly understood as physical sites in which historical knowledge and memory are collected, organized, and preserved. Archives convey a certain air of authority, of neutrality, of completeness: of the record as somehow transparent, given, fixed. Yet bound up in issues of power and posterity, archives embody the ongoing entanglement of social and historical relations: What is collected, cherished, sought after, ignored? Who and what is made present, salient; what slips between the cracks, into the silences? And how do these choices shape future conditions for navigating the past?
After Archives brings together the work of three artists – Alex Callender, Sarah Stefana Smith, and Wendel White – who engage archival practices, content, and forms to examine, unearth, interrogate, and reimagine aspects of African American history and experience. Wendel White finds and photographs embodied traces of America’s interwoven histories of slavery, abolitionism, segregation, and civil rights in historical collections across the nation: a lock of Frederick Douglass’s hair; a hand-drawn map of Eatonville, Florida, one of the oldest Black-incorporated municipalities in the United States. Working with New England archival collections (including the W.E.B. Du Bois papers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst), Callender explores historic land and housing policies that continue to impact communities of color. And, through permeable sculpture and installation made from “threshold” materials, Smith gives form to the interplay of absence and presence in historical records, finding and making space for untold stories, for affect and emotion.
Each artist charts a course “between or out of or in the holes” of the archive, navigating the ways in which space, bodies, material traces, and forms of (un)freedom intersect.
Programs:
Opening reception, March 3, 5-7pm
Northampton Arts Night Out, March 10, 5-8pm
Making History Manifest: Photography in the Archives: Sunday March 12, 3pm
Zoom talk with artist Wendel White [registration link here] - in partnership with Historic Northampton and the David Ruggles Center