Heirlooms/Evidence
During a potluck dinner in 2019, my friend and arts educator Alexis Lambrou told me about a class assignment for graduate school in which everyone was asked to bring in an object related to their cultural background. Alexis decided to bring in a photo album of her grandparents' trip to Kenya in 1980. In it, she found uncomfortable images and captions—signs of colonial thinking and privilege in navigating the experiences and landscapes of the "other." We discussed how many objects in our family archives could be seen through this lens, and I couldn’t stop thinking about our conversation. In all my work with photography, I had never been asked to look at my own archive in this way. This request invited radical disclosure, vulnerability, and reflection.
Over the next six months, Alexis, her colleague and museum educator Sarah Winter, and I co-designed a workshop that asked other White-identifying people to find and analyze these objects in their archives. At the time, I was thinking a lot about my former high school in Massachusetts, which was named after a Native American tribe and had a Native mascot but was made up of more than 90% white students. I included my high school ID in our first three objects.
We facilitated the first gathering virtually in the summer of 2020, just as the protests in response to George Floyd’s murder spread across the U.S.
Photomapping became a central practice of the workshop. Using artists like Wendy Red Star and Nigel Poor as examples, we began to draw and sketch around and onto our images and objects, revealing layers of context, questions, and new understandings—making Whiteness more visible.
We continued the workshop at Photoville, an annual outdoor photography festival based in New York City. The workshop ran virtually in 2020 and 2021 with a group of White-identifying photographers interested in exploring their own archives through the lens of Whiteness.
What is inherited, and what do we do with that inheritance? Heirlooms/Evidence asked participants to reflect on that question, as a way to rethink and shift the nature of what we pass on.
For me, mapping my understanding of my high school’s mascot led me to research the history of the school and become involved in the effort to change our the mascot alongside local Native activists and leaders, current students, and other alumni.
