Mildred Howard, I've been a Witness to this Game XXII, 2016, Monoprint/digital with collage and gold leaf, Museum purchase, The Nancy Gray Sherrill, Class of 1954, Collection Acquisition Fund 2016.127

Sovereign Memory: Photography, Remembrance, and Displaced Histories explores photography as a strategy for healing from what Gloria Anzaldúa, celebrated queer Chicana cultural theorist and poet, has described as the colonial wound. The artists in this group exhibition each employ the photograph as a connective tissue, stitching together individuals, families, and communities to severed histories and identities. All share a concern with how images profoundly shape the stories of where we come from–and who we are.

Photography has revolutionized how we represent our histories, solidifying architectures of personal and collective memory through archives born of visual technologies. Photography also has a darker history as a colonial machine producing images in support of empires. For communities who have endured the global longue durée of colonialism and continue to navigate legacies of its violence, histories told through the lens of photography can re-implement a colonial gaze, enacting a series of erasures. The multiplicity of personal and collective experiences becomes distilled into a single, simplified story told from an exterior perspective. Featuring a transnational selection of photographic works from the Davis’s collections, this exhibition expands that single, false story into many sovereign memories. These artworks have become emblems for reconnecting to known and unknown histories, enacting memory as an emancipatory strategy.

Curated by Jessica Orzulak, Associate Curator and Curatorial Affairs Manager at the Asheville Art Museum and former Linda Wyatt Gruber ‘66 Curatorial Fellow in Photography at the Davis Museum, this exhibition is supported with funds given through the generosity of Linda Wyatt Gruber (Class of 1966).