Trying To Remember The Future, Installation

Created for the exhibition, Borderlands: Soft Margins, Hard Truths, presented at Cummings Art Gallery, Connecticut College, The installation is comprised of two works: Trying to Remember The Future, 2026 and Toile des Enfants, 2004.

Toile des Enfants, is an art wallpaper and textile that made it's debut in an installation of the same name at a fundraising event for the Studio Museum in Harlem in the spring of 2005. The toile pattern was designed as an interrogation of traditional Toile de Jouy decorative patterns which have historically depicted white Europeans (often peasants) in idyllic pastoral scenes. From it's atypical color palette, to the substitution of houseflies for farm animals, to it's genre scenes of 20th century-era brothers and sisters (adapted from an early 70’s photo series by Nancy Sirkus of a black family living in public housing in Harlem), this toile inverts the symbolism of quaint rustic poverty. In doing so it ponders whether contemporary black poverty in this context is viewed as sentimentally as it's white counterpart, either implicitly or explicitly? And if so, how have visual producers and cultural gatekeepers normalized and reinforced cliches about poverty for cultural consumption? Toile des Enfants offers an alternative narrative that centers and elevates a specific Black American experience while also critiquing entrenched racial and class stereotypes.