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BLOODLINES

As America becomes an even greater multicultural, multiracial country, it is important to examine the historical foundation that has shaped this great country. 

This exhibit was inspired by a very personal family investigation into the travails from the continent of Africa, through the grotesque institution of slavery to Georgia, and eventually to Los Angeles, California.  I was indelibly moved by my family’s legacy of tenacity and survival. She reconnects with a span of 302 years of stories, images, and compassion demonstrated by her ancestors.   “The knowledge of my bloodline has become immeasurably important to me.  Every Iota of information has touched me.” Through my personal story, the broader truth is that it is an American story that represents an interconnection of millions of people by race, religions, and regions, as a new American nation was built. Bloodlines is where the past and the present intersect and profundity and meaning are, hopefully coalesced. It is a testimony of the dehumanizing cruelty of institutionalized slavery and post slavery colonialism in America, and the human spirit that would not be broken. Even today residual attitudes and behaviors spawn from the slave experience in America haunt and sometimes inhibit the furtherance of our more perfect union.  As America becomes an even greater multicultural, multiracial country, it is important to examine the historical foundation that has shaped this great country.