All Covenants Herein, Screenprint, 2022



To Bind Said Lots, Screenprint, 2022



Said Owners Themselves, Letterpress Collograph, 2022



Said Premises, Letterpress Collograph, 2022



Installation view from The West Edge Factory 

SAID OWNERS, SAID LOTS 

Text from Said Owners, Said Lots, an exhibition at The West Edge Factory: Turret Gallery, Huntington, WV, in October, 2022:

This cluster of four prints centers around the transformation of a working-class neighborhood in 1920s Huntington, West Virginia from a multiracial space into a segregated one, subdivision by subdivision. Many of the white residents in the subdivisions along what is now Hal Greer Boulevard adopted restrictive covenants to keep their properties from passing to Black residents, giving legal sanction to residential segregation.

The two screen prints are imagined environments of two subdivisions that contained factories. Since many white residents of these subdivisions added racial covenants to their deeds in the 1910s and 20s, the figures represent possible groupings of workers as they conspired to sign the covenants. The Rau and Jones Addition (represented in the blue print- “All Covenants Herein”) contained the Bluejay Manufacturing Company which made overalls, and the Ceramic Addition (represented in the red print- “To Bind Said Lots”) contained the Wyllie China Company, which made dinnerware. Decorative surface patterns from the factories’ products layer with the flattened figures, and the interaction of the figures with geographic diagrams gestures to the interplay between individuals and systems. The diagrams outline which lots did, and which did not, adopt the covenants.

The collograph prints contain text from two different covenants that were signed by multiple residents; the text in “Said Owners Themselves” was signed by 59 homeowners along 9th Avenue. The prints alternate between positive and negative, pointing to the binaries imposed by the covenants: constructing whiteness and othering blackness by drawing geographic lines.

This project seeks to bring history to the surface and asks viewers to question how it remains manifest in contemporary geographic and cultural footprints, both in Huntington and elsewhere, as racial covenants were widely adopted across the United States in the early part of the 20th century.


These prints build off of the academic work of historian Cicero M. Fain III and geographer Jacqueline Housel, specifically Housel’s 2002 paper “The Construction of a “Colored” Neighborhood: The Shaping of Washington Place, Huntington, WV, 1905-1925,” Fain’s 2007 paper “Black Response to the Construction of Colored Huntington, West Virginia during the Jim Crow Era,” and Fain’s 2019 book “Black Huntington: An Appalachian Story.”


Process notes: 
The screenprints were made during a fellowship from the Center for the Study of Gender and Ethnicity in Appalachia at Marshall University in 2022. 

The collographs were made on a Universal 1 Vandercook letterpress during a residency at In Cahoots in Petaluma, California in 2022.