In the exhibit Negatives Preserved, I follow America’s story of segregation through my family’s history of land, alongside the creation of America’s suburbs, and my own birth and upbringing in Midwestern sundown towns in Wisconsin and Illinois. The use of photography, mapping, sculpture and the archive, allows me to swing between the micro and macro, and ask how one white family’s home ownership affects Black and brown families in a country whose laws and policies continue to be inherently racist. 

The point of departure begins with the archival photographs of my great-great-grandfather, JC Land, who was born in Grand Island, New York, in the mid 1800’s and moved to Waukesha, Wisconsin in the 1870’s. I traveled to Waukesha in 2021, to learn more about my first generation German-American ancestor and to unpack how a traveling portrait photographer, within the first few years of his arrival, managed to secure a brick and mortar photo studio along with three other buildings, including a large house on Main Street. Through the experience of walking while documenting with photography and video, I retraced the steps of my great-great-grandfather, visiting site specific locations in Waukesha while uncovering his archive in the Waukesha County Museum Research Center. 

Main Street combines a replica of an archival photograph by JC Land and an intervention of moss. Photographed from the top of City Hall, I was taken aback by the size of the home on Main Street, owned by my great-great-grandfather soon after arriving in Wisconsin. My only choice was to travel to Waukesha and walk the street where this home once stood. The piece becomes a photographic intervention, disrupting the romanticism that photographs can hold, and questioning the ways in which this property was obtained. 

Main Street

Upon return from Waukesha, I began to investigate the policies that likely benefited my family throughout the past 150 years: from the Homestead Act to the Dawes Act, from the GI Bill after WWII to redlining and suburban sprawl. In the sculpture Homesteads, 1878-1998, I use textiles to create a generational archive of owned family homes. The structure alludes to the domestic–a white picket fence or fabric invoking a laundry line; both tools that signal home while defining the outline of one's property. With the familial archive alongside my own photography, I attempt to understand how history determines who continues to have access to land. 

The show’s central statue, White Flight, employs alginate cast in envelopes, to engage the intimate violence of white silence and the things that remain unspoken about. The castings, though seemingly contained, thrust out like shards to show the violence that came with white communities. Considered an unearthing, White Flight speaks to the stories that weren’t told across generations, the histories of entire populations, unrecognized. 

An archive reveals only the perspectives of those chosen to be preserved within it. What is not said contains more history than ever was told. In JC Land’s archive there is an unawareness that from the 1880s, and at the tail end of Reconstruction, towns throughout Wisconsin explicitly barred Black and brown families from integrating white communities. Also not shown is the backlash to the abolition of slavery, the formerly enslaved, or the forced displacement to Oklahoma and the West, of the many Indigenous populations, including Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo), Peoria, Bodwéwadmi (Potawatomi), Očhéthi Šakówiŋ (Sioux), Hoocąk (Ho-Chunk) and Myaamia (Miami). The pieces in Negatives Preserved ask the viewer to consider these omissions as we observe land, the archive, and a white family’s history in America. 

Investigating beginnings and middles instead of endings, Negatives Preserved is an examination into land and the histories untold, its privileges informing the narratives we have. The show asks for white Americans to view American histories from a more truthful lens, confronting the ways one participates in and upholds white supremacy.