Visual Restorative Justice: Ghostitudes [Currency] The Keller Family Project 2024
By Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle/Olomidara Yaya
During May 2024, Sarah Eisner from The Reparations Project reached out to me to discuss the possibility of doing a private commission for her work with her ancestors who were enslavers in Savannah, Georgia. As a death doula who does legacy projects and works with intensive archives from our collective history especially ones that feature the ghosted, silenced, and unnamed, I decided to allow KACH Studio to take on the project. I began to dig deeper into the currency that I was working with for Repossessions an art exhibition curated by Dr. Bridget Cooks Cumbo. Ghostitudes [Currency] The Keller Family Project 2024 pieces differ dramatically in scale and concept for my approach to working with the same materials (confederate money) for the traveling exhibition. In addition to the works produced at a much smaller scale, dissections and replacement material were not executed in the same fashion, and elements needed to leap outside the rectilinear frames of the currency to take up space in a different way. This project was a sacred, heavy, and beyond-powerful undertaking and I told Sarah that I was not working for her but for our ancestors who brought us together to work on this heavy task. It was so powerful because, within a lot of the services that I offer, I am the one who folks come to when they have something super intense and have no clue about what to do with. We collaborate and release what needs to be released whether it is a story, event, personal item, etc. I have also helped people to create performances and rituals to facilitate this healing as well.
In engaging with Ghostitudes [Currency]: The Keller Family Project 2024 our relationship to the historical present can be intimately examined within the aftermath of The Emancipation Proclamation through what I have coined "Visual Restorative Justice" or VRJ. This is a method that I created while working on The Bayview Hunter's Point public art commission for the Alex Picture Room in San Francisco 2022. Visual Restorative Justice is a way to use images from archives or the absence of certain presences within archives to take up space and renegotiate the terms of how they were disseminated or not allowed to be circulated. Within this method, I interrogate both sides of erasure and secrecy concerning the American and global racial caste systems. This art piece represents money that is ghosted yet, very thick, very visceral, and very much alive in the same way that the legacy of enslavement still is and the reasons why we must continue to examine it carefully and not be afraid to dissect and re-imagine it.
Due to this piece becoming a replacement for the actual bills, which are now in my care to be responsible for and shared with the larger collective; there needed to be maintained legibility of the authorship of the bills, through preserving the written text and portraits of individuals on the front of the bills, to keep the culprits who put these historical documents into circulation as a form of visible accountability and linked to their hopes that if the South won the war these loaded bills would eventually be worth something.
While examining the research from materials provided by Sarah, I spent a lot of time with the genealogy research The Kellers—A Family Chronicle, 1966 conducted by a family member, Dr. Andrew Lewis, who went on to become a prominent historian and MacArthur Fellow. With his research, a thesis at Dartmouth, he was able to learn more in-depth about the context and connections that the family had with the Confederacy as a whole. While sitting with Dr. Lewis’ work, I concluded that the bills were not just for everyday civilian usage but represented something powerful to the owner, who was a member of the Confederate army’s home militia as an officer and Sarah's great great great grandfather. As a planter, George Keller Sr. had a lot at stake if the South lost the war. For the money to be preserved and kept so long, found in a closet that was brought all the way to California from Georgia, it was not only a document of the succession of The Confederate States, but also a talisman of what he and his brethren were fighting to keep and maintain.
Dr. Lewis’ research was by far one of the most unglorifying accounts of slave-holding ancestors that I have witnessed in my years of studying people’s independent and personal genealogy research conducted by descendants of enslavers. Usually, these reports involve no direct mention of ancestors being slave owners, the individuals that they enslaved, or anything that would make the family look or seem unfavorable. Usually, the professions they talk about are business owners, planters, or any other roles that have to do with massive agricultural industries. I found his research to be a powerful baton that was handed to Sarah for her to run her part of the relay race which is the daunting task of cleaning up the legacy of what it means to be a descendant of enslavers and the enslaved.
I have a theory that I like to call The Baton Race. It entails that no matter what your relationship is to history, we all have our own part of the race to run and by doing so we are preparing to hand the baton down to the next person to run the race in the only way they know how.
This work cannot be achieved in one lifetime alone, and it is the responsibility of individuals within a bloodline to try to run as far as they absolutely can during their section of the relay race with the skills, resources, and fortitude that they can so that the work can continue for further potential runners. Skills and resources do not have to be monetary. They can also be emotional intelligence, courage, fortitude, stamina, and eagerness to learn and break generational curses. This particular private art commission was designed specifically to be in conversation with the next individuals in the bloodline who will one day take the place of Sarah and the work that she is continuing in Dr. Lewis’ name and so many other future descendants known and unknown. The piece is a talisman of Visual Restorative Justice and renegotiates what an heirloom is and can become. As a descendent of both the enslaved and enslavers to me, it also represents refusal and that there will always be people who come from the depths of not only our shared past but our shared future to help bring once denied truths to light.
Throughout the piece, I had the urge to find the names of the individuals that The Kellers enslaved in hopes of writing their names on the bills or including them with the piece. After further research, I discovered that this in no way should happen at all as a way of honoring the formerly enslaved individuals because not one of the named individuals within the documents that showed their names and ages decided to keep the Keller surname after emancipation. Coming across this was one of the most radical aspects of historical exile, protection, and self-erasure that I had ever witnessed within years of archival research concerning naming in the African diaspora. Keeping a slave master’s surname had its implications that could allow family and friends to find each other who were sold away, or it could also be a name that is shed off along with the chains and stench of enslavement, as a new and more profound way of emancipation, and also a form of protection riding off the sting of The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 that changed the boundaries and conditions of freedom drastically overnight. In honor of this radical choice, I decided to honor their decision to no longer be associated with the Keller name and to allow their names to remain unassociated with the Confederate currency.
Major themes that run throughout the pieces:
Eyes- Justice, witnessing, accountability, possibilities of looking beyond the past, beyond the present and beyond the future, and humanity. One can see another’s soul through their eyes.
Water- transportation, deluges, forced immigration, battles fought on the water during the Civil War, cleansing, purifying, The American Psyche as a tidal wave, reflections, portholes, and portals.
Deconstructed flags- ripped and torn fragments, The American flag becoming undone or reconstructing itself through bits and pieces from the deluge.
Dried blood- represents the fruits of labor (birthing and toiling), the sweat and tears of enslaved individuals, and the bloodshed on both sides to fight to be free and for oppression simultaneously. Daily, this is a continuous fight when one has to choose which route to take in relationship to familial history and ties to the past. It also represents the bloodlines and the origins of any money associated with the states of America (Union or Confederacy).
Golden Light- represents illumination, a continuation of governance, and the need to also keep counter lights on to continue fighting for the abolishment of de facto enslavement policies that still impact the caste system in America.
Double sides: This piece will always have a conflicting front and back. If it is hung on the wall, one has to choose which side will show. The side with Confederate figures both real and imagined, or the side with Black women's eyes and a floating head appearing to be at rest whether she is in harm's way or leaving it. Whichever side one chooses, you will still have to contend with what is on the other side, not at all unlike the aspects of working towards reparations as the collective descendants of the formerly enslaved and former enslavers.
To allow the piece to perform this double-sidedness I was able to create a concept in which when we framed the piece it would be able to be free-standing and allowed to float between glass untethered. If you follow my practice you know that I am not a huge fan of oppressive and heavy framing and l love for the work to be ghostly and float or a frame to recede into the wall even going as far as painting the walls the same color as the backgrounds of the paintings. This is prominently featured in The Evanesced Series. Sarah and I decided to use the people who have been framing my work since 2012 City Picture Frame and as usual I brought them something challenging and they did a phenomenal job. The piece came out amazing and it was everything I dreamed it to be. While trying to see which frames would be a good fit we ended up loving the subtle shift in wood colors and tones from two different frames so we decided to lean into this duality and use them both. The front side of the bills features a darker colored frame and the back of the bills features a lighter colored frame. In this case of the frames, I wanted to riff off of the display of coin collections and bills in which the piece would also have the option to be handled and inspected intimately in the same way that one would look at a beloved coin collection.
As we know, all money is loaded with imagery and political significance, whether it be slave masters, BIPOC people, or flora and fauna featured. One could argue that our current money is no different from the complicated history and representation of Confederate money since current American currency features slave masters and Monticello, a major plantation owned by Thomas Jefferson in which people were enslaved and forced to endure atrocities at the hands of an enslaver who also authored The Declaration of Independence. This horrific irony is still alive and on full display when we look at a nickel. While researching I stumbled across this description below from Regina Coles on her 2018 visit to Monticello for Forbes magazine:
“(On the back of the nickel, we see the west portico.) This is where Jefferson’s visitors could admire his artifacts while they waited for him. Included are objects representing American natural history, western civilization, and American Indian cultures. A bust of Alexander Hamilton shares the room with over 40 Native American artifacts, maps, moose antlers, and a great clock whose case was designed by Jefferson.”
One can imagine this piece as a meta-reconfiguration of a man like Jefferson’s collection, who authored the document that would make America become what it was to become. Having his likeness and plantation visually rendered on our current currency, normalizes and scrubs his true role in our country as a slave master and early architect of white supremacist settler colonialism for time to come.
There is also George Washington featured on the one dollar bill who was notorious for his cruelties to the people he was “gifted” from marrying Martha Washington therefore taking ownership of all of her “property” as was customary during the time, and Andrew Jackson who is responsible for the Trail of Tears. These men’s faces and former enslavement camps are on the cash that circulates daily in our pockets, restaurants, grocery stores, and throughout so many other daily aspects of living. We gift each other these images with slave masters proudly inscribed on them. With the invention of digital currency, we are becoming further removed from bills and coins now exchanging goods with corporate logos, brands, and colors that change access to physical bills. Perhaps some years from now current US dollars will be discussed in the same way that confederacy money and other problematic currency are being discussed these bills will be a testament to what this society was founded on.
This re-imagination of the Confederate currency would not be possible without the support and materials that Sarah’s mother, Harriet Wilson Lee, provided her with. Together, they discovered the bills in some belongings that made their way to California from Savannah. If not for this chance of fate, perhaps the bills would still be undisclosed and unable to be considered for Visual Restorative Justice via my unique approach to working with haunting archival materials. We here at KACH Studio offer Mrs. Wilson Lee and Sarah Eisner thanks for being open to working with re-imagining these bills and allowing KACH Studio to keep them for the collective and further explorations of Visual Restorative Justice. This has by far been one of the most intense commissions of my career and I am so honored to do this work and to be chosen as a translator for these bills. So many of us have items that we are holding on to that we have inherited and do not know how to bring into the light. My work as a death doula, healer, and artist who has a penchant for history is leading me into more alignment with the future for our shared past, especially in light of this heated election year. Thank you for reading if you got this far! I wish you continued safety, love, and light and to keep doing your work for your bloodlines no matter what side of the coin you are on *pun intended* !
*This description/essay and any images may not be reproduced or used in any capacity without the express written permission of the Artist & Writer, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle/Olomidara Yaya- KACH Studio © 2024 All photos of framed artwork and image at City Picture Frame are used with permission and are courtesy of Sarah Eisner.
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