Radical Empathy in the Act of Remembrance

Featuring work by:

Tony Bingham
Soynika Edwards-Bush
Darius Hill
Vincent Lawson
June Reddix-Stennis

The new exhibition, Soil: Radical Empathy in the Act of Remembrance, at the Alabama Contemporary Art Center (ACAC) in downtown Mobile challenges us not to look away.  Though the subject matter is difficult, looking away from it is exactly what has created our amnesia of the horrific events in Mobile County and countless others around the country that took place during the Era of Racial Terror, a period in our nation’s history from 1877-1950 when Black men, women and children were routinely murdered by mobs as a means to maintain white supremacy.  And, though such heinous acts were regularly met with justice after 1950, looking away gave birth to injustices we are often blind to, but play out today in the form of generational poverty, financial and housing discrimination, and mass incarceration.

In conjunction with the Mobile County Community Remembrance Project, a local grassroots program affiliated with the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, ACAC has commissioned new works from five Black artists around the state to interpret this history through their own eyes and to reclaim the dignity of the lives of six lynching victims in Mobile County during this period:  Zachariah Graham (1891), Richard Robinson and Will Thompson (1906), Mose Dorsett (1907), Richard Robertson (1909), and James Lewis (1919).  The new works — created by Tony Bingham, Soynika Edwards-Bush, Darius Hill, Vincent Lawson, and June Reddix-Stennis – are meant to lift up these lives and to give them voice.

“One of the goals of Soil is to confront Mobile’s history of violence, to own it, and to create a space for remembrance and a new imagining of who we can be as a community moving forward,” said ACAC Executive Director elizabet elliott.  “Simply knowing history does not result in real change.  Art has the ability to take a broken history and create a deeper perspective which allows us to traverse the trauma and acknowledge its full impact.  The difficult act of fully reckoning with this history gives us the ability to create a new whole.”

Soil: Radical Empathy in the Act of Remembrance, opening Friday, April 14, was made possible through the generous support of Mobile County Commission District 1 Commissioner Merceria Ludgood, who convened the Mobile County Community Remembrance Project, a group of about 50 diverse volunteers. “Part of our charge as a Community Remembrance Project is to foster meaningful dialogue about race and justice and to invite our entire community to acknowledge our true history and the legacy it carries so we can move forward with policies and actions that create a more just and peaceful society. This exhibit is such an effort,” she said. “For those who are inclined to think these injustices happened too long ago to matter or that these atrocities are too far removed from them, we invite you to join us.  We are ALL responsible.  As I once heard a tribal elder from one of the First Nations in the Seattle area say, ‘you are responsible for what you have seen.’”

MEET THE ARTISTS DINNER

Thursday, June 29, 6-9 p.m.

Generous funding for this exhibition and related programming is provided by: