ADEBUNMI GBADEBO: My name is Adebunmi Gbadebo, and I’m a visual artist working between Newark, New Jersey and Philadelphia.

“K.S.” is the inscription that is carved into one of the headstones on True Blue Cemetery in Fort Motte, South Carolina. Our family was enslaved on True Blue Plantation. The headstones in this cemetery are the only things that carry this acknowledgement of my ancestors.

In 2020, I made a trip to South Carolina to the cemetery. And I had that first idea: Can I make work from the very land that my ancestors were enslaved on, and they’re currently buried?

The materials used to make K.S. are the actual physical soil that I dug up (Laughs) and brought back to my studio in Philadelphia and also the human hair of Aaron Wilson, Kelsey Jackson and Cheryl Person, who all donated their locks to me. Black hair that not only is literally from Black bodies; it is our body, it carries our DNA.

NARRATOR: Gbadebo’s second piece commemorates a relative, Pirecie [Percy] McCory. It's also made from clay made from the soil of True Blue Cemetery—but this time, she adds rice.

ADEBUNMI GBADEBO: It is that Carolina Gold grain, which was at one point South Carolina’s biggest cash crop. You know, it wasn’t cotton; it was rice.

Rice and indigo are not indigenous to Europe or North America, they’re indigenous to Asia and Africa. Enslavers went to specific African countries, like Sierra Leone and Guinea, where they had centuries of knowledge of working in indigo and rice. It’s not just the human manpower that these enslavers depended on; they depended on our centuries of history of working in these crops. It shows how we as African people carry history within our very bodies.

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DAVID MACK: I think the discoveries that we’re making about David Drake are still ongoing. I think we’re just breaking into, the beginning of his legacy and understanding, his world.

GLENN LIGON: There are lots of things about Edgefield pottery, Dave’s pots in particular, that we can't know. I think that artists are responding by making things that in some ways are about filling in those things we can't know. With new things, with new objects, with new thoughts about those objects.

VINCENT BROWN: I think I hear a message in this work that speaks to me across time. It's kind of an inside joke that the endurance that Black people had, their perseverance under extreme circumstances, is in some ways, our transcendence.

NARRATOR: Thank you for listening to this Audio Guide. For more information about the speakers and their work, please visit the exhibition website.