Her work talked back to the erasures of history. She marked historical moments relating life moments of the Black community she lived in and loved. Photograph of artist’s gallery talk and discussion of “Fannie,” “1870 Census,” and “1880 Census.”Īminah Robinson understood the toil of reconstructing what she called the “missing pages of American history.” Using stitchwork, drawing, and painting she re-membered the past, preserved marginalized voices, and documented history. While her lifetime rooted my maternal line in Caroline County, Virginia, research revealed sparse lines of biography. The final panels in the exhibit introduced my tribute to Fannie, born in 1840, a likely enslaved foremother. The layers of collage, silhouette, and stitched patterns in “Blood on a Blackberry,” “Blackberry Cobbler,” “Braids,” “Can’t See the Road Ahead,” “Sit Side Me,” “Behind Her Gaze,” “Fannie,” “1870 Census,” and “1880 Census” confronted the past and imagined memories. The Blood on a Blackberry collection exhibited at the museum expressed the expansion of my writing into multidisciplinary form. In a museum talk on July 24, 2022, I related my creative experiences during the residency and shared how questions about ancestors infused my storytelling. Those memories of blackberry cobbler suggested the handwork, craftwork, and lovework Black families lean on to survive struggle and celebrate life. As she reminisced about baking, I recalled weekends gathering berries in patches along country roads, the labor of children collecting berries, placing them in buckets, walking along roads fearful of snakes, listening to what might be ahead or hidden in the bushes and bramble. The blackberry in my storytelling became a metaphor for Black life constructed from the poetry of my mother’s speech, a southern poetics as she recalled the ingredients of a recipe. Color and texture marked childhood innocence, female vulnerability, and bits of memories. As I cut excerpts from my prose and poetry in sheets of mulberry paper, I assembled fragmented memories and reframed unrecorded history into visual narratives. The texts I created reimagined “Blood on a Blackberry” in hand-cut shapes drawn from traditions of Black women’s stitchwork. Working in Aminah Robinson’s studio, I traveled the line that carries my family history and my creative writing crossed new boundaries. Photographs of the artist and visual texts of ancestor mothers hanging in studio at Aminah Robinson house. Toni Morrison called memory “the deliberate act of remembering, a form of willed creation – to dwell on the way it appeared and why it appeared in a particular way.” The act of remembering through poetic language and collage helped me to better understand these ancestor mothers and give them their say. Recorded public history often distorted or omitted the stories of these women, so my history-mapping relied on memories associated with feelings. Research was not enough to bring them to me. What frightened them? How did they talk when sitting with friends? What did they confess? How did they talk to strangers? What did they conceal? What was girlhood like? Womanhood? These questions led me to writing that explored how they must have felt. What were their secrets? What songs did they sing? What desires sat in their hearts? Stirred their hearts? What were the night sounds and day sounds they heard? I wanted to know their thoughts about the world around them. I knew the names of the ancestor mothers, but I knew little of their lives. What thoughts hid behind their deep penetrating looks? Their bodies suggested a permanence in the Virginia landscape around them. Museum art talk “Time and Reflection: Behind Her Gaze.” Photograph from the writer’s family album. Three generations of ancestral mothers held their bodies still outside of what looked like a poorly-built cabin. The starting point for “Blood on a Blackberry” and the writing during this project was a photograph taken more than a century ago that I found in a family album. I crafted narratives through a mixed media application of vintage buttons, antique laces and fabrics, and text on cloth-like paper. During my residency at the Aminah Robinson house, I examined the impulses behind my prose poem “Blood on a Blackberry” and found a kinship with the textile artist and writer who made her home a creative safe space. History-mapping draws the wide and narrow, the known and unknown past to the present. Click here for more information on visiting. Wearing a mask at the Museum is optional. Posts by Darlene Taylor | Columbus Museum of Art
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