Yesterday, Today (2021)
A public installation intended to explore, question and respond to the American north and south’s historical relationships to the slave trade and the pervasive examples in which binary ideals of place proceed to exist within the contemporary landscape of Rhode Island. The project began in response to a book of bound pamphlets found within the Providence Public Library’s Special Collections featuring publications produced during the Civil War that were distributed by both abolitionist and pro-slavery groups within the Union States.
In a similar format as the bound pamphlets, this project represents this two-sided argument in the format of ten large-scale nylon flags that will be displayed in a processional style within the Chase Center Staircase that connects Benefit Street to North Main — a throughway to the fraught locale of Market Square. The materiality references abolitionist broadside that were printed on silk. As a means of preservation, printers would decide to produce a small run of “important” messages on fabrics such as silks, nylons, and wools to ensure that these messages be saved for future audiences. Similarly, these flags reproduce quotes from the bound pamphlets in conjunction with a quote by contemporary writers and historians.
Documentation photography by Dougal Henken and Bethany Johns.
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