At the age of 51, Winfred Rembert began chronicling his harrowing experiences of oppression, persecution, and political struggle in the Jim Crow South. Painted on carved and tooled leather, reclaiming a craft he learned in prison, Rembert’s oeuvre materially evokes the ways that, in the words of PTSD expert Bessel van der Kolk, "the body keeps the score".

White Gold  (2017), a highly patterned surface with alternating rows of colorfully dressed workers and bold white cotton balls, plays with the line between visibility and obscurity.

Chain Gang Picking Cotton (2011), a tightly cropped landscape of winding black and white and green bands, play with the line between visibility and obscurity.

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Chasing Me to My Grave, Rembert wrote, "People...don’t recognize those stripes as people until they take a real good look. That was my goal—to put it down so you couldn’t understand it until you take a real up-close look. That tells you something about prison life."

As a young man, after being attacked during a peaceful Civil Rights demonstration in Georgia, he fled in a stolen car, illustrated in The Getaway (2015), only to be arrested and thrown into jail. After a year without charges, Rembert managed to escape, but was caught, put inside the trunk of a police car, and narrowly survived a lynching before being sent back to prison and sentenced to hard labor.

Yvonne Wells, a long-time educator in the Alabama Public School system, is known for her didactic 'story quilts' that uniquely meld geometric abstraction and bold figurations.Replete with biblical iconography, and historical imagery, her works highlight Alabama's fraught racial past and America’s ongoing struggle for equality and justice.

Quilting, long associated with women's work and the domestic sphere, and the artist’s preferred pastel colorways, serve as a compelling foil to the sobering histories of violence enacted against, as well as the triumphs of African Americans in the pursuit for equal rights.

In her epic 12-part work Two Accusers, Nine Accused (2014), Yvonne Wells engages the infamous story of the Scottsboro Boys, one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice in American history. 

Arranged in a grid formation, a title panel flanked by saccharinely sinister likenesses of the two female accusers sit above nine, hagiographic portraits of the young men, their names and ages scrawled carefully across their necks. Above each of their heads, three birds fly in a line to signify the Christian holy trinity, symbolizing the artist’s faith and eternal sanctity of human life.

Working across analog photography and film, Isabelle Armand’s projects seek to make visible the oft-overlooked lives, cultures, geographies of the disenfranchised.

The twenty-five monochromatic photographs, exhibited here for the first time, center on Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer, two men from Noxubee County, Mississippi, who in the early 90s were wrongfully convicted of murders they did not commit, based on pseudoscientific forensic evidence. The men collectively served more than 33 years of these sentences before the Innocence Project successfully took on their cases resulting in their exoneration in 2008.