A Blues for...
What do a people do with their history of horror? What does it mean to bear witness in the act of watching a retelling? What does it mean to carry cultural memory on the flesh?
- Elizabeth Alexander
A Blues for... pairs photographs of the 2014 Ferguson uprising with text works culled from news articles, headlines, conversations and other information that is held in our bodies, knowingly and unknowingly.
This work, this blues, stems from the grief of living in traumatic times of state sanctioned violence and hashtag death rosters. This work was an interruption to my other work. It was and is uncomfortable and agonizing. It interrogates the silence that plagues Saint Louis and America. A discomfort many would rather bury like a body than to face.
