Currently, some of the loudest (and crudest) American political voices seek to silence the truth of America’s brutal history of commodification and ownership of people as property without personhood or civil rights. They venerate historical Confederate men as icons of patriotism, call them heroes, and fight attempts to remove statues built in eras when some Americans considered slavery “acceptable.” They work to stop teaching schoolchildren the authentic history of our cruelty because talking about racism or slavery would hurt white students’ feelings. A southern governor who at one point in time was a U.S. history teacher has gone so far as to state that slavery actually had positive benefits because it taught skills that the enslaved could later monetize. Boston University professor Takeo Rivera, an assistant professor of English who focuses on race in the United States, has called this a “propagandist, exceptionalist, triumphalist myth” that can only be told by completely distorting “the facts about past and ongoing racial oppression.” I have some words for these politicians, but they are not civil enough to state here.

I can’t know what it must be like to grow up with this legacy of barbarized inhumanity as part of my family story, nor can I imagine what it might be like as an adult to learn that my ancestors had propagated this systemic and grave mistreatment of humans in pursuit of financial gains. Linda Plaisted can speak to the latter, however. Because in 2020, she learned that her ancestors had done just that.

Since that day, she has created two bodies of work based on this knowledge. This work, Kintsuge Altarpiece, is from the series entitled Once Removed. Unlike the contemporary American political figures who want to decimate the truth of the history of American slavery, Plaisted told me that she feels shame for not having known the truth and for having to unlearn a family history that hid its secrets and buried the truth. All the iconography she used intentionally and thoughtfully selected imparts meaning. With the aim of processing her ancestor’s history in mind, Plaisted has focused this series on a transcendent foundation, focusing on the freedoms women found post-emancipation to grow their family trees in more fertile soil. “The Kintsugi Altarpiece intentionally brings together many overlapping cultural practices that strive for ancestral healing and affirm that the destructive patterns of thought and deed end with me and will not be passed on to my descendants.” Her goal, she says, is to teach a complete history, to lift the voices of those who have been intentionally silenced.

This work was so compelling that on first seeing I instantly contacted Plaisted about writing about it. She hits the right notes between seeing, hiding, and mending via her choices of color and materials, making it a riveting piece of work.

I can't wait to see what Plaisted does next. Bravo, Linda!

Artist Bio

Linda Plaisted is an American multi-disciplinary artist whose exploratory practices include photography, collage, painting and encaustic; often combining all of the above in hands-on mixed media pieces. Her work has been exhibited widely in galleries such as The Center for Fine Art Photography, The Center for Photographic Art, Colorado Photographic Arts Center, A. Smith Gallery and The Southeast Center for Photography and seen in publications such as Artdoc Magazine and Lenscratch. She is a 2023 Julia Margaret Cameron Award Winner and a 2023 Photolucida Critical Mass Top 200 Finalist.

See more of her work here: https://lindaplaisted.com/

Author Bio

Diana Nicholette Jeon is an award-winning artist based in Honolulu, HI, who works primarily with lens-based media. Her work has been seen both internationally and nationally in solo and group exhibitions. Jeon holds an MFA from UMBC.