RECKONING
2024
84” x 84” x 60”
Mixed Media

I was recently reminded of the Nina Simone quote, “How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?” and used that as my guiding principle while developing this exhibition. I took the title A Still Small Voice from 1 Kings 19:11-13 in the Christian Bible that references the whispered voice of God during a difficult moral choice. This exhibition examines how religion in the United States has played, and continues to play, a major role in Civil Rights and Social Justice movements…both as a positive and negative.  

The pieces included in A Still Small Voice reflect the dichotomy of how religion, both historically and contemporarily, is used to defend systems of belief. One aspect of the exhibition depicts how the religious tenets of faith, love, and unity compelled leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lewis and sustained the masses of civil rights/social justice protestors, while the other side of white supremacists, Christian nationalists, and the Ku Klux Klan often uses religion to justify their hate, xenophobia, and deemed superiority. This exhibition embraces the message that separate or second-class status is never equal, and cruelty is where we, as decent human beings, must draw the line and simply love one another.

Materials for this project are salvaged from an old 110-year-old church in the deep South with the names of two old ‘valiant Confederate Soldiers hand painted on the stained-glass windows. They were both ministers of the church in the late 1800’s into the early 1900’s. This project has also been quite the journey for me. It’s taken over a year to secure the salvage rights, do the archival research of finding and studying the original church minutes, planning the project, then bringing the entire project to fruition. Another thing I discovered while reading the church minutes was that I had ancestors that went to this church back in the day and I never knew it existed.

What is old is new again. The struggles of spirituality, the struggles of religion, the struggles of combating white supremacy, and the struggles of equality and freedom.

The church pew itself is a rare salesman sample. If you look closely, you will see that each wooden side is different, to give the church options before investing. I hope this project is a reminder that we too have options and a choice.

Wood, Glass, Steel