This video gives a good overview of the experience of our 2023 Black and white Wallace homecoming October 6-8, 2023. We began on Friday the 6th with a visit to the Datcher History House and a “Meet and Greet” at the Harpersville Community Center. Our reunion continued in the Wallace Family Cemetery on Saturday morning, followed by discussion groups at the house. Right after dinner on the grounds, artist Elizabeth Webb invited Black descendants to sign their names for inscription into a column of the With Love, For Grief sculpture. Saturday ended with a jazz concert from the front porch of the house. On Sunday, family convened at the Scott’s Grove Baptist Church, the mother church of the Black community, which was founded during enslavement.

Peter Datcher shared his story with Alabama News Center in a video embedded in an online article. He is descended from Lucy Wallace Baker, who was enslaved on the Wallace Plantation, and Albert Baker. Albert Baker founded the farm that has been in their family for generations. Datcher keeps history alive for the Harpersville Black community, maintaining a history house with pictures, articles, and books of genealogy of local families. Peter Datcher is a founding member of the Board of Klein Arts & Culture.

Meaghann Bridgeman, Executive Director of Create Birmingham, interviewed cofounders Theo Perkins and Nell Gottlieb about their personal histories, the story of the founding of Klein Arts & Culture, and their hopes and dreams for the future. They talked about the homecomings of Black and white descendants as the signature event in their program year and the importance of reckoning with the truth of history and contrasting lived experiences to create a new narrative together.

Karl Whitmire’s front page State of Denial article on November 27, 2002 was about antebellum house museums. After describing his experiences in the First White House of the Confederacy, the John W. Inzer Museum, and Magnolia Grove, confederate house museums funded by the state of Alabama, Whitmire turns to Klein Arts & Culture as a counterpoint, an example of a reparative way to interpret plantation houses. He reviews the founding of the organization by Theoangelo Perkins, the current Mayor of Harpersville, and Nell Gottlieb, and its mission of reconciliation through the arts and education. Whitmire attended the 2022 homecoming and the dedication of Tony Bingham’s sculpture Bearing Witness: Praise House - Sun Shadows and saw first hand what we are doing at the Wallace House. Click here for the newsprint version, the full transcript, and the section about Klein Arts & Culture.

In 2020, following the world premiere of Migratuse Ataraxia by the Wideman-Davis Dance Company at the Wallace House, the Monograph Series produced a video about the founding of Klein Arts & Culture and its mission and the conceptualization of Migratuse Ataraxia and Thaddeus Davis and Tanya Wideman-Davis’s thoughts about producing it in rural Alabama at the Wallace House. It includes footage from their workshop in Columbia, SC, the dress rehearsal at the Wallace House, and interviews with those involved.

The narrative studio 1504 is producing a documentary : The Praise House. The trailer may be viewed here. Also there is a website about the sculpture. Bearing Witness: Praise House - Sun Shadows was dedicated at the Wallace House on October 15, 2022.