They stand in the windows of shops, bars, the courthouse, professional offices, and studio spaces. Like enslaved people, they are both conspicuous and ordinary. Like slavery once was, the figures are everywhere. Each piece, like all good public history, pushes viewers to consider the past, present, and future all at once.

The installations, through a collection of translucent tapestries installed into windows serve as a ghostly reminder of the space’s previous life. Layering history, text, and at times visitor’s own reflections in the plate glass of store windows, i was here significantly contributes to public engagement with this important history.

The goal of commemorating a legacy of abuse, violence, and pain presents certain challenges. i was here meets these challenges in an eloquent, reverent, and respectful way. At each installation, there is a sanctification ceremony that invites all facets of the community to pay their respects to those thousands of human beings who moved through the square never to return to bring healing by honoring the past and planting a vision of the future.

Each piece is as complex as the victims of the trade. The portraits featuring contemporary African Americans transform individuals into representative ancestors. They are of all ages and genders just like those once sold. They are printed on translucent tapestries, allowing viewers to literally see through them and for light to shine through them. These figures are surrounded by longitude and latitude of prominent Trans-Atlantic slavery history sites asking viewers to consider the broader connections of enslaved people sold at auction to vast histories of enslavement. They stand in the windows of shops, bars, the courthouse, professional offices, and studio spaces.

At the heart of the project is the concept of connection. Every place that the installation travels to will bring the connections between sites of the internal trade into conversation. The portraits connect across the space of the square where viewers can see multiple pieces from one vantagepoint. Visitors connect to the images and the histories of mid-Atlantic slavery, from sites of the slave trade in West Africa to sites of enslavement in the United States through the coordinates provided. Sites in Kentucky are connected to cities and towns all over the American South through the enslaved people who passed through the city as chattel. Viewers in different geographic locations where the project is installed connect to each other through the pieces. i was here asks us to engage with history of place and in doing so, craft a path to our future.

Vanessa Holden, Assistant Professor of African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky writing as a specialist in the history of American slavery.

on street museums

Place-based engagement with history that alters the landscape so that the public quite literally sees familiar places in new ways.

Lexington, Kentucky

Although this project launches in Kentucky, the repercussions from slavery are not merely a 'southern issue'. It is a national wound that we, as fellow Americans, must heal. Central to the project is a blessing that augments the visual imagery. There is a prayer spoken at the epicenter of each site to sanctify the space.

Winchester

This installation occurs in a rural community that received significant economic benefit through the business of enslavement. The collaged portraits form cohesive, ethereal images that convey the dignity of the African-American subject and family – two great casualties of slavery and things much at a loss in this country’s visual history.