Busboys Books Presents: Road Through Midnight with Jessica Ingram
Date and Time
Feb 24, 2020 6:00 pm
Location
14th & V
2021 14th St NW, Washington, District of Columbia, 20009
Feb 24, 2020 6:00 pm
14th & V
This event is FREE and open to the public. Books will be available in the bookstore for purchase & full menu and bar will be served in the event space.
At first glance, Jessica Ingram’s landscape photographs could have been made nearly anywhere in the American South: a fenced-in backyard, a dirt road lined by overgrowth, a field grooved with muddy tire prints. These seemingly ordinary places, however, were the sites of pivotal events during the civil rights era, though often there is not a plaque with dates and names to mark their importance. Many of these places are where the bodies of activists, mill workers, store owners, sharecroppers, children and teenagers were murdered or found, victims of racist violence. Images of these places are interspersed with oral histories from victims’ families and investigative journalists, as well as pages from newspapers and FBI files and other ephemera.
With Road Through Midnight, the result of nearly a decade of research and fieldwork, Ingram unlocks powerful and complex histories to reframe these commonplace landscapes as sites of both remembrance and resistance and transforms the way we regard both what has happened and what’s happening now—as the fight for civil rights goes on and memorialization has become the literal subject of contested cultural and societal ground.
Jessica Ingram is assistant professor of art at Florida State University.
