2020-2021

Developed alongside arts educators Alexis Lambrou and Sarah Winter, and inspired by Kerry James Marshall’s Heirlooms & Accessories (2002), this intimate, archival workshop uses personal objects and images to unpack lineages of whiteness, repositioning familiar items as evidence of systemic power structures. Heirlooms/Evidence is geared towards white-identifying people or those who feel some proximity to whiteness they wish to explore. Participants and facilitators bring objects or photographs to share, annotate and “map” them, and discuss what emerges when we examine our archives from this vantage point.

Rather than observing and analyzing oppressive structures and histories solely from an “objective” distance (a kind of looking that is also entangled with whiteness), Heirlooms/Evidence invites photographers, educators, and scholars to simultaneously interrogate whiteness at the personal and familial level, and to move from a place of self-reflection and situated knowledge. This workshop encourages us to consider what we have inherited, and what we want to dismantle, resist, reshape, or pass on.