With Love, For Grief, a site-specific community sculpture
The collaborative sculpture process began in 2019 with a series of conversations with the Black descendant community around what reparations could look like—not on a federal level, but on a local scale. These intergenerational conversations took place at multiple locations, including Peter Datcher's "History House" in Creswell and at the Wallace House on Juneteenth during an inaugural Black Descendant Day. Two major themes emerged from these conversations: a desire for a formal permanent acknowledgment of the names of those enslaved on the Wallace Plantation, and a desire for educational scholarships for the larger Harpersville/Vincent community. The sculpture is composed of the four original poplar columns that once supported the portico of the Wallace House. Aluminum, poured by the team at Sloss Furnaces in Birmingham, fills in the physical gaps in the columns. These columns are said to have held the signatures of attendees of house parties in the early 1900s. Though these names are long erased, the story remains. The sculpture reclaims this story to center the presence of the Black descendant community and their ancestors. At the Wallace Homecoming in October 2023, descendants of those who were enslaved or were sharecroppers at the Wallace House were invited to sign their own names onto the columns. On Martin Luther King weekend in 2023, descendants signed the names of their enslaved ancestors onto another column. . As part of this project, the Wallace Center agreed to create four scholarships--one for each of the columns--equal to the amount of money invested in the metal. This is both a poetic and tangible effort to begin a process of repair.
At the dedication on February 24, 2024, Elizabeth M. Webb, the artist who created the sculpture with poet Salaam Green and the Wallace descendant community, gave a brief talk about the conceptualization and process of creation of With Love, For Grief. The 1870 census included the name of Grief Wallace, a 28 year old freedman who was a farmer. Salaam Green read her poem For Grief at the dedication. Peter Datcher spoke about the importance of remembering our ancestors, and Henry Smith gave a powerful poetic and political talk about slavery as a “bad thing”.
