THE LEGACY
Featuring the work of Tokie Rome-Taylor, a photographic artist based in Atlanta. She describes her work as “a speculative visual history” that combines the actual with the possible. Her images reimagine Black childhood in the American South, piecing together a lineage that should have remained unbroken.
This book visualizes a reality in which Black families have accrued generational wealth proportional to the skill and labor they have contributed to the US economy.
In particular, cotton and indigo generated billions of dollars of income for white plantation owners and merchants whose descendants still benefit. What if the people who cultivated, harvested, and processed those lucrative plants had been paid fairly for their work? What if property could have been owned and passed down? Opportunities for the descendants of these workers would have multiplied with each successive generation.
Our book opens out into a form suggestive of a quilt. This represents the intentional gifting of hopes and dreams to one's progeny, realized by the work of one’s hands. After countless hours of labor creating it, a quilt might be passed down in a family to nurture both the body and the spirit of the recipient. In addition to warming the bones, the stitches and substance of such an object say “You are loved; you are valued.”
There is a legend that encoded designs in quilts aired outdoors were used to provide direction and information to people escaping enslavement in the Southern states. It is both a chilling and a beautiful idea, though there is no surviving evidence to support it. In accordance with the “new visual folktales” Rome-Taylor has created with her work, we nod to the quilt in legend and reality as a means of empathy & communication, and to all creative pursuits for their ability to show us the way to a better world.
Cotton paper dyed with indigo & photographs printed on cotton paper in the form of a quilt with gold stitching; comes with an accompanying booklet, & a walnut box. Quilt is about 14” x 19” when open. Box is about 6” x 7” x 2” when closed.
Edition of 30 copies. $1850
