Composer: Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs. Associate Producer: Jordan Bailey. Visual Creative Director: Kenesha Sneed. Merch Director: Caroline Knowles. Editorial Assistant: Laura Bertocci. Design Assistant: Brijae Morris.
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It brings together new scholarship exploring the themes of the exhibition. First, consider the crosshairs. Consider this contemporary sign of the cross that unremittingly frames black lives in the United States. From behind the red crosshairs peers a faded black-and-white image of Trayvon Martin, the year-old African American teenager who was shot and killed in by neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman. But Piper is more than a producer of mnemonic devices and empathic tools. For decades she has exploited the uneasy distance between the privileged world of institutionalized art and the social reality of black lives outside its walls. Piper placed the crosshairs off-center, with the four cardinal points set at asymmetric and unequal intervals to the border. The black border holds space for a perspective in which whiteness is neither the center nor the frame.
TRANSCRIPT: SHE’S GOT GUTS
By Beth Stebner. Following a day of protests calling for the arrest of a neighborhood watch captain who fatally shot an unarmed black teen, the U. Justice Department announced late last night that it will investigate the case. George Zimmerman, 28, claimed he shot year-old Trayvon Martin last month in self-defense during a confrontation in a gated community in Sanford, Florida. The announcement of a federal investigation came after the devastated mother of Trayvon claimed the attack was racially motivated.
A few words on the innocence of Trayvon Martin. The very idea will outrage certain people. Experience says the notion of Trayvon Martin being innocent will offend them deeply. And there are things that need saying. His divorced parents say much of it in "Rest in Power," their new book about the tragedy. But in death, he became a figure we could only see through the dark mirror of evidence and testimony, a cursed single night when our son and all that life inside him was reduced to a stranger, a black kid in a hoodie, a young man in the shadows. A suspect.
