Tangled Roots (Installation View)

Lynching in America, Slavery, White Supremacy, Social Injustice, Jim Crow Laws, Hate Crimes

Nine 36" x 30" double plexi and mirrored-backed vitrines in magnetized birch base set in steel grid framework with crystal prisms, Louisiana barbed-wire, glass, copper wire, ash, powdered metals, synthetic polymer, resin, mixed-media. 

 

Quotes from Abel Meeropol's poem "Strange Fruit" and Claude McKay's poem, The Lynching.

 

There were 4,608 lynchings in the United States between 1882 and 1932. More than seven in ten lynching victims were African Americans. Until anti-lynching campaigns became more poitically motivated, lynchings through the early 1900's were treated as local matters. In December 2018, the US Senate unanimously passed a bill that would, for the first time, explicitly make lynching a federal crime

 

The Lynching 

by Claude McKay

 

119" x 91" x 1.75" (302 x 231 x 4.5 cm)