Black Wall Street Journey #5

2021

This zigzagging collage suggests at once a grid-likemapping of urban space and a fragmented history preserved by place and by memory. The painting relates to the social practice aspect of Rick Lowe’s body of work around the 1921 Tulsa Massacre. In this act of racial violence, one deliberately written out of mainstream U.S. history, white Oklahomans destroyed the prosperous Black neighborhood and business district of Greenwood (commonly known as Black Wall Street), killing nearly three hundred residents and displacing thousands more. To mark the centennial of this harrowing event, Lowe launched a series of art and public history projects in order to call attention to the tragedies, personal stories, and ongoing legacies of Black Wall Street.