Between The Hawk and The Buzzard: New Sculptural Works by Nafis M. White in Collaboration with the Rhode Island State Archives

August 20, 2020 – October 13, 2020
Opening Reception Cancelled due to COVID-19 Emergency

EXHIBITION STATEMENT:
In her “Ain’t I A Woman” speech published by Marius Robinson on June 21, 1851 in the Salem Anti-Slavery Bugle, Sojourner Truth said that, “the women are coming up, blessed be God, and a few of the men are coming up with them.” Truth spoke passionately about women’s rights and advocated for Black women to be a vocal and visible part of the massive national movement for women’s suffrage. She also had her words rewritten and sanitized by Francis Gage, a white suffragette invested in making Truth seem less intelligent and, thus, more palatable to whites. White women in the movement denigrated the contributions of Black suffragettes by demanding they go to the back of the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Procession in Washington DC but prominent Black leaders like Ida B. Wells-Barnett refused to be segregated. In Rhode Island, suffragettes Mary E. Jackson and Bertha Higgins, like Wells-Barnett, championed the rights of Black women and challenged attempts to render their organizing efforts and bodies invisible in the struggle.

The 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote, but its passage did not confer equal access to African American, Latinx, Asian and Indigenous women – for all intents and purposes non-white women were still disenfranchised. The current COVID 19-era presidential election, perhaps the most consequential in a generation, is about to transpire and Black women, Black men and communities of color are still facing unprecedented voter suppression efforts. Honoring the centennial celebration of women’s suffrage without attending to their stories risks leaving out immense troves of historical data. Nafis M. White activates the Rhode Island State Archives to create work that honors the centennial by discovering who these powerful women activists were, and are. In accessing and making public these records, her work empowers viewers to bear witness to a political process that has great significance for every resident of this state and country today.