In the Room
A group exhibition of artists
Kelly Kristin Jones, Ashley M. Freeby, and Jonathan Mark Jackson
Curated by Frances Cathryn
June 10–August 12, 2023
Black experience in any modern city or town in the Americas is a haunting. One enters a room and history follows; one enters a room and history precedes. History is already seated in the chair in the empty room when one arrives. Where one stands in a society seems always related to this historical experience. Where one can be observed is relative to that history. All human effort seems to emanate from this door. How do I know this? Only by selfobservation, only by looking. Only by feeling. Only by being a part, sitting in the room with history.
Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes on Belonging
TOP: Protesters rally in front of the statues on Academy Green in Kingston, June 2020.
Photo: Stephanie Alinsug.
Several years ago, I started a campaign to remove three monuments from Academy Green, a public park overseen by a private preservation society in Kingston, New York. Originally cast by a bronze foundry in 1898 and installed on a bank facade in Manhattan, the statues were intended for scrap after renovations a half-century later. A local art patron, having read about the statues in the New York Times, purchased three in 1950 and gifted them to Ulster County, where they have stood in public view since. The men memorialized there have historical ties to the city, but their presence in the park is circumstantial. Understanding the process by which the monuments arrived in Academy Green is not unproductive, however: it provides a critical framework for reinterpreting how history is made, recorded, and retold.
In his foundational text Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, the late Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot laid out his argument for that historiography. The chronicling of past events into a narrative is always a result of decisions by the author, whose every choice is an opportunity for mediation and the official and unofficial exercise of power. Identifying those traces of authorship allows one a method of countermediation—a way to challenge an established social structure of supremacy and violence.
In the Room is organized for the Center for Photography at Woodstock based on themes in my own research and writing since the campaign to remove the Academy Green statues. It showcases new and existing works by three contemporary artists working with photography: Kelly Kristin Jones, Ashley M. Freeby, and Jonathan Mark Jackson. Each of these artists
deals with historical constructions of identity and the power of display. Through still photography, archival research, family histories, and digital-editing tools, they explore the relationships between personal and collective memories, considering how they are made, challenged, and remade.
The show takes its title from Canadian poet Dionne Brand’s book, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, in which she describes how history is “already seated in the chair in the empty room when one arrives.”[1] The room, in this context and in the context of the show, is not a particular place—it is every place. We are all relative to a shared past, and we are all responsible for the ways this past continues to shape our lives, by more or less extreme and violent means.
Knowing photography’s complicated history as a technology that makes soft power possible, the artists in this exhibition exploit the medium to undermine the ways we document and remember, as well as to question who is worth remembering. Through the artists’ critical interventions, we can better understand how photographs are, as author Ariella Aïsha Azoulay explains, social objects that maintain the power held by the people who made them.[2]
Much of Chicago-based artist Kelly Kristin Jones’s photographic work addresses what Trouillot called the “production of history”—that is, how we participate in history as both actors and narrators—especially as it relates to the ways identity and power intersect. By examining both the processes and the conditions of this historical production, we can understand the “exercise of power that makes some narratives possible and
silences others.”[3] Jones is particularly interested in the role of white women, who, in an effort to gain social status, have helped to perpetuate a narrow view of the American past, one based on myths that rationalize the nation’s ongoing violence.
White women, firmly believing in their own benevolence, have inadvertently maintained a singular, politically salient retelling of American history. Emily Crane Chadbourne, who gifted the monuments to Academy Green, was a respected art patron and former president of the Senate House Museum in Kingston. Like most white women throughout the country’s history, however, Chadbourne also justified its constitutional legitimacy. I include myself: While growing up in Wisconsin, I would often join my mother as she worked at the Milton House, a local house museum. As a child, I was photographed in historical costume for the local newspaper. I got my first job at that museum, working as a tour guide every summer until college. But as I later realized, the narrative we learned about that place and for years would recite was a historical fiction, or at best a partial history.
Jones’s work examines the implications of this fantasy of historical production and the culture of silences it generates. Until recently, this critical examination has focused on public monuments and the ways we live with history. Several years ago, the artist inherited her grandfather’s collection of family photo albums and came across vacation scenes of her grandmother posing with monuments across the country. She was struck by the ease and familiarity of her grandmother with a historical fiction she has spent most of her practice working to lay bare. Jones started searching for similar images, and
has since collected more than five hundred photographs of women (almost always white) with monuments or statuary in the frame. Patterns materialized, and the artist organized them around different archetypes into an ever-enlarging archive.
The women in Jones’s collection vary in age and class, and appear across generations. You can often trace the year the photograph was taken by whether the image is in color or black-and-white, by the woman’s dress and self-presentation, and even by the way she interacts with the figures in the scene. Some women smile back at the camera, or look shy, or annoyed, or sometimes seductive. But all the women have one thing in common: their intimate role in engineering the landscape of an authoritative history.[4]
If Jones’s collection of found photographs shows us the ease with which white women produce history, then Ashley M. Freeby’s series “Many Thousands Gone” reminds us how often people of color are routinely silenced in its retelling, and why. That series began in 2017 as an investigation into media representations of sites of police brutality. Freeby sourced each image through an online search of a crime scene or a memorial where a Black person was murdered by the state. For every one of Jones’s images of a white woman engineering a landscape intimating violence, Freeby deals with its express aftermath on African Americans today.
Originally from Allentown, Pennsylvania, with mixed German and African American ancestry, Freeby is acutely aware of the ways in which race and power produce the spaces she inhabits. Scholars such as Katherine McKittrick have argued that Black lives are shaped by a logic of racial discrimination—a series of
violent geographies based on an American caste system laid out centuries ago.[5] From policing and surveillance to housing and education, we are living in what scholar Christina Sharpe describes as “the afterlives of that brutality that is not in the past,”[6] or what writer Saidiya Hartman might call a failure to look outside a “racial calculus” in the collective imagination.[7]
With all identifying features of the dead and the violence removed, Freeby’s photographs confront the viewer with the important question of recognition and value of Black life. In her book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Sharpe outlines her method for understanding the status of contemporary Black life—what she calls “wake work”—or that Black death is foundational to American life.[8] As a type of wake work, Freeby meticulously removes all signs of brutality in the scenes she collects—a bit of caution tape, a blood stain, an empty shoe—leaving behind an uncanny image, in Brand’s words, a “haunting.”
By digitally manipulating the images for the series, Freeby calls attention to the social significance of a site without directly showing the brutality that took place there. Scholar Leigh Raiford describes this as the practice of “critical Black memory.”[9] Freeby draws from the long and pernicious histories of extralegal lynchings and lynching postcards— images of racial-terror violence commercially available at low-cost for wide distribution as a souvenir. Sourcing her images from digital media, Freeby investigates these modern-day lynchings and their relevance in contemporary discourse. As in photographer Ken Gonzales-Day’s “Erased Lynching” series, described by scholars Eve Tuck and
K. Wayne Yang, removing the violence in the image prevents the reproducibility of that violence, as well as its de facto justification.[10]
But Freeby’s role as the artist is also one of refusal. By removing the signs of brutalization, she is interrupting the ongoing cycle in the media of Black-death-spectacle. Erasing marginalized histories is often criticized, for good and obvious reasons. Freeby’s form of erasure, however, is a model for productive critical intervention. Each image in “Many Thousands Gone” becomes a memorial to a Black life without reproducing the evidence of (and for many, justification for) Black death in the photographic archive. As scholar Nicole Ivy explains, Freeby’s digitally altered photographs document “histories of a present time that is changed and charged by violence but not reducible to it.”[11]
For Jonathan Mark Jackson, attending to Black life in the archive is another form of intervention in the production of history, delivering the possibility for repair. In 1827, Jackson’s fifth great-grandfather Robert Roberts published The House Servant’s Directory, the first commercially distributed book written by an African American. According to family records, Roberts was a free man living in Boston and working as a butler. He assembled the book as a guide to the profession and a reference to the skills he had learned in his career.
After discovering his ancestor’s chronicle, Jackson, who was born in Detroit but now lives outside Boston, spent the next several years conducting a deep historical study of colonial Black life in the Northeast. Visiting historic sites and house museums to produce self-portraits, Jackson took Dionne
Ashley
The frontispiece to The House Servant’s Directory.
Brand’s line as a literal directive and sat in those rooms “with history.” Among the museums Jackson visited was Gore Place in Waltham, Massachusetts, where his grandfather was employed at the time he published his book. I met Jackson in the summer of 2021, when he was an artist in residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock and I was working at a historic house museum in New Paltz. The homes preserved there were part of the larger slave-owning society in the region; knowing this, Jackson was interested in including them in his work.
Placing himself in these spaces is a way for Jackson to imagine, as Sharpe puts it, “ways of knowing that past, in excess of the fictions of the archive.”[12] Jackson often borrows from the writings of Toni Morrison, and he employs her concept of “rememory” to describe his way of embodying and re-mapping the presence of Black life in the Northeast. Whether Jackson’s ancestors or those of another Black American family, these people lived full lives regardless of their inclusion in any official record. Acknowledging their significance to the history of these spaces is for Jackson a process of “reclaiming the dead.”[13]
By reclaiming the Black subject in the historical record, Jackson’s works directly confront the silences attended to in Freeby’s scenes of contemporary violence. And like Freeby, Jackson reimagines these lives that were violently excluded from the archive, without reproducing that violence. In Stamp (2019) for instance, Jackson positions himself as the historicized Black subject, but he will not confront the viewer, turning his head away as he rests it on a table. This moment of denial, as scholar Marisa Fuentes would describe, is a way of challenging the authority of an official and violent archive.[14]
Jackson’s portraits also refuse the scrutiny of Jones’s subjects, including the one reproduced as an enlarged image on the opposite wall of the CPW installation. Unlike many of the other found photographs of white women with monuments in public spaces, this snapshot shows a woman in a home, smiling at a bust she embraces. The tension between Jackson and Jones’s subjects lies in the power dynamic revealed in their display: The self-portrait demands the viewer humanize its Black subject in a way presupposed by the white woman at the center of the found photograph exhibited across the gallery.
Paired with this enlarged vernacular image, and disrupting its dynamic, are photographs from a new work commissioned for this exhibition. The artist and I partnered with local youth to confront the three statues on Kingston’s Academy Green. The aim was to undermine the monuments’ place in the park by photographing the performance participants physically covering the monuments in different ways. The resulting images are meant as a protest, a way to highlight how history is continually and often violently produced in and by public space. The photographs also demonstrate tactics for how we might interrupt that mode of production and the violence fundamental to their display.
If we accept Trouillot’s argument that we are both the actors and the narrators in the production of history, we then have the capability to disrupt the process of historical production, and in turn, to realize our own narrative agency. Azoulay calls this “potential history,” or the creation of “new conditions both for the appearance of things and for our appearance as its narrators, as the ones who can—at any given moment—
intervene in the order of things that constituent violence has created.”[15]
For Jackson, that shift has occurred in his more recent portraiture; in effect, the artist is creating potential histories through new methods of Black documentation—a counternarrative to representations of Black life today. To photograph Day, Singing (2023), Jackson traveled to his hometown of Detroit to record both audio and still images of a friend singing a traditional hymnal. The singer stands near the middle of the frame with hands out in front of her body and palms upturned. Her expression is mid-note and her posture is relaxed, signaling her ease within her surroundings. By re-placing a Black subject in public space (one with not-so-distant histories of racial segregation and redlining as evidenced by the homes at the edge of the frame) Jackson’s portrait shifts the medium. Paired with the recording of Day singing, the portrait becomes multifaceted, showing us that there is no better way to repair the silences throughout history than to hear, quite literally, from those who have been silenced in its production.
Frances Cathryn Curator1. Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2002), p. 25.
2. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, “The Captive Photograph,” Boston Review, Sept. 23, 2021. https://www.bostonreview.net/ articles/the-captive-photograph/
3. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), p. 25.
4. Erin Jane Nelson, “Dodge & Burn: The Photographic Interventions of Kelly Kristin Jones,” Burnaway, March 11, 2020. https://burnaway.org/ magazine/kelly-kristin-jones-profile/
5. Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
6. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 99.
7. Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008), p. 6.
8. Jenna Wortham. “The Woman Shaping a Generation of Black Thought,” The New York Times Magazine, April 26, 2023. https://www. nytimes.com/2023/04/26/magazine/ christina-sharpe-black-literature.html
9. Leigh Raiford, “Photography and the Practices of Critical Black Memory,” History and Theory 48, no. 4 (2009): 112–29.
10. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “R-Words: Refusing Research,” Qualitative Inquiry 20 (2014): 223–47. https://static1.squarespace. com/static/557744ffe4b013bae3b7af63/t/557f2ee5e4b0220eff4ae4b5/1434398437409/ Tuck+and+Yang+R+Words_Refusing+Research.pdf
11. Nicole Ivy, “On Watching and Black Death Notices,” (Un)Sterile Soil, 2020. https://www.unsterilesoil.online/ horizon-o
12. Sharpe, In the Wake, p. 13.
13. Hartman, Lose Your Mother, p. 6.
14. Marissa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
15. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay. “Potential History: Thinking Through Violence,” Critical Inquiry 39, no 3 (Spring 2013): 548–74.
Works in the Exhibition
1. Jonathan Mark Jackson, Stamp, 2019. Archival inkjet print, 24 x 36 in.
2. Jonathan Mark Jackson, Devils, 2019. Archival inkjet print, 36 x 24 in.
3. Jonathan Mark Jackson, Moon, 2019. Archival inkjet print, 36 x 24 in.
4. Jonathan Mark Jackson, Day, Singing, 2023. Archival inkjet print, 40 x 50 in.
5. Kelly Kristin Jones, “White Women and Monuments,” 2023. Installation, unique found photographs in stacks on a 32-by-97-inch table in the center of the gallery.
6. Kelly Kristin Jones, Untitled (5/21/2023 Place Corps workshop in collaboration with CPW), 2023. Archival inkjet prints, each 16 x 22 in.
7. Ashley M. Freeby, “Many Thousands Gone” series, 2017–ongoing. Archival inkjet print, 30 x 24 in.
8. Ashley M. Freeby, “Many Thousands Gone” series, 2017–ongoing. Archival inkjet print, 30 x 24 in.
9. Ashley M. Freeby, “Many Thousands Gone” series, 2017–ongoing. Archival inkjet print, 30 x 24 in.
10. Ashley M. Freeby, “Many Thousands Gone” series, 2017–ongoing. Archival inkjet print, 30 x 24 in.
11. Ashley M. Freeby, “Many Thousands Gone” series, 2017–ongoing. Archival inkjet print, 30 x 24 in.
Executive Director
Brian Wallis
Curator
Frances Cathryn
Curatorial Coordinator
Adam Giles Ryan
Design William van Roden
Photographic Printing
Sarrah Danziger
Special thanks to Sarah Jurgielewicz
Nicole Leonardo
Anna Van Lenten
Center for Photography at Woodstock
474 Broadway Kingston, NY 12401
This exhibition was made possible with support from Place Corps, the Leonian Foundation, the NoVo Foundation, the Joy of Giving Something Foundation, the Gunk Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
