CONSTRUCTING BLACK HISTORY.

History and memory are not gods, and a painting cannot resurrect or undo the past. However, our desire to be made whole is inextricably entangled in a web of history, memory and visual representation. Recalling, forgetting, recording, commemorating and re-presenting are instrumental in constructing this mutable homespun web. Visible to us only through the lens of the present, it engenders our notions of self and culture.

From our memory we extract source material for constructing our histories. Memory adds breath, texture and poetry to who we are, who we were and who we wish to become. Exactitude and fact are less important than abstraction and significance. When I was young, my grandmother would be silent about the slavery-times of her grandmother. Today however, she speaks at length, and in great detail about those stories. Memories can be simultaneously personal, like those of my grandmother, or collective like those we celebrate when we call on black history. They insure our cultural continuity.

If memory is a poem, then history is an expository essay. It explains, chronicles, defines, analyzes and argues information from the past that is thought to have had significant bearing on an individual, community or culture. Memory, art, rituals, photographs, books and prayers are all source material for constructing history. Chroniclers select what reflects or caters to their needs in the present. What is overlooked and selectively forgotten when history is told, is as important as what is recalled.

Artists record and retell our spiritual, cultural, political and intellectual conditions. When their artistic production results from an intersection of personal and collective memory (even the terrors we have collectively chosen to forget), their art forms part of a web of continuous connection to our past that reminds us that throughout the history of our increasingly global society, we were there. The books I have chosen for this issue provide the proof of our presence in pictures.