We were honored to acquire five photographic prints by contemporary photographer Kris Graves that were featured in our recent groundbreaking exhibition The Legacy of Lynching: Confronting Racial Terror in America. The show was a unique and unprecedented collaboration with an advocacy group, the Equal Justice Initiative, who commissioned emerging artists to participate in gathering personal narratives about this era of racial terrorism. Graves photographed Tarabu Betserai Kirkland and his mother Mamie Kirkland to accompany their testimony.
Mamie and her family fled to Illinois from Ellisville, Mississippi in 1912 under threat of racial violence. Kirkland tells the story of a close family friend who was brutally lynched and murdered in 1919, watched by a crowd of thousands, for allegedly assaulting a white woman. In the years that followed, Mamie’s family experienced several subsequent acts of racial terror in the Midwest, forced to flee again further north.
Graves shot in Los Angeles, where Tarabu lives, and also in Ellisville. His frank portraits and landscapes are imbued with a remarkable stillness. In capturing specific moments they nonetheless allude to the inevitable passage of time—in Mamie’s weathered hands, mother and son posed with their family photographs, or a tangled Mississippi tree, this family’s remarkable history and survival comes alive in Graves’s work.
Posted by Sara Softness Kris Graves (American, born 1982). (1) Tarabu and Mamie Kirkland, Los Angeles, California, 2017. (2) Mamie Kirkland's Hands, Los Angeles, California, 2017. (3) Tarabu on his Front Porch, Los Angeles, California, 2017. (4) The Lynching Location of John Hartfield (1919), Ellisville, Mississippi, 2017. (5) Tarabu and Mamie Kirkland in the Kitchen, Los Angeles, California, 2017. Chromogenic photographs. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the artist, 2017.25.1. © artist or artist's estate
