Miriam Matthews, c. 1920.

Conceived during a yearlong fellowship with A.I.R. Gallery, Call & Response presented five new textile works. Employing the Black oral and musical tradition of call-and-response as a framework, these works considered how resurfaced histories move us into a space of reflection and invite us to contemplate our role in shaping futures. The work of my great-aunt Miriam Matthews, a librarian, historian, and anti-censorship advocate during the McCarthy Era of the late 1940s–1950s, served as an ancestral point of departure for exploring the ways that both the presence and absence of information affect our understanding of history. Quilted textiles silkscreened with images and documents culled from family and public archives are repeated, sequenced, and layered throughout the exhibition, forming a spatiotemporal dialogue and drawing throughlines between the ideological flashpoints of Matthews’ time and our own.  

Adorning the textiles are a series of symbols and shapes, rendered in grounding earth tones. Pitchers, eyes, compasses, and intuitive marks combine and accumulate into a semiotic language, serving as guideposts and alluding to Black American histories of migration and fugitivity. Call & Response offers a countergaze to the many mechanisms that monitor and control our ways of knowing, and contemplates how obscured or censored information might be recovered. Many of the photographs included in the work are of Dallas-area students in the 1950s, made by my grandfather Wendell Long while he was an educator in the Dallas Independent School District.