ANOTHER VERY QUICK post today to bring your attention to a public art exhibit titled Say Their Names that will be displayed in Hillsborough this Juneteenth weekend.
For almost a year, I’ve been working via Zoom with a talented group after we received an Orange County Arts Commission grant. I have gladly followed my partners’ leads.
They are: Renée Price, Fred Joiner, Donn Young.
RENÉE PRICE is the Co-Founder of Free Spirit Freedom and Chair of the Orange County Board of Commissioners (and 2020 North Carolina Commissioner of the Year).
FRED JOINER is the Poet Laureate of Carrboro, has been an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, and is a curator.
DONN YOUNG is an accomplished photographer who has organized the Triangle’s largest group exhibition and produced the best attended art exhibit in the history of the Louisiana State Archives.
Say Their Names will be exhibited outside the Hillsborough Visitors Center this weekend, as well as next week for Last Friday.
SAY THEIR NAMES
Hillsborough Visitors Center
150 E. King Street
Friday, June 18: 4 p.m. - 8p.m.
Saturday, June 19: 10 a.m. - 1 p.m. (Juneteenth)
Sunday, June 20: 4 p.m. - 7 p.m.
Friday, June 25: 6 p.m. - 8 p.m. (Last Friday)
In a sense, Say Their Names is a historical timeline. More broadly, it connects through centuries some of this nation’s ugly racial violence, dating from 1619 to 2021. What we see now in the news and on the streets is nothing new. It’s important to recognize there have been many named and unnamed victims throughout American and North Carolina history that we failed to reckon with or even remember. Likewise, there has been a strong, proud history of artistic, cultural, political, and movement responses to injustice throughout those centuries, some of which is chronicled as well.
In that spirit, the exhibit also features a poem by Jaki Shelton Green, the Poet Laureate of North Carolina, that she has graciously granted permission to include.
Fred Joiner has written two moving poems for Say Their Names. One is titled “For the #Unnamed”. The other is “May 13, 1985 — This is America” about the bombing of a city block by the Philadelphia Police Department when Mr. Joiner was a child.
He will read his poetry around 5:30 p.m. at tonight’s opening.
Below is an excerpt from “For the #Unnamed”. We hope to see you in Hillsborough.
For the #Unnamed
by Fred Joiner
for every body
attached to a #,
there are bodies
that will never
be found, a name
only the soil will
know, that will
not aggregate
on our timelines
or our memories.
where is that jealous
& vengeful G-d now?
we pray
with our feet1
for the unnamed,
for a shorter bend in the arc
of the moral universe,
a more immediate justice2.
A reference to Frederick Douglass who said nothing changed about the condition of his enslavement until he “prayed with his legs.”
A reference to a line from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s speech where he said “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”