Till (Primary Title)

"My work reflects the process of transition—objects in motion, imagery submerged just below the surface, the traces of an explosion. I am interested in examining how evidence is presented, how events are reconstructed." —Carrie Iverson

Iverson’s print addresses the 1955 murder of African- American teenager Emmett Till in Mississippi. The case became a flashpoint for the civil rights movement, especially when photographs of Till’s mangled body, lying in an open casket as his mother requested, were made public. Two white men were tried for the murder but were acquitted. Here words—taken from the trial, from the artist’s poems, and from the Bible—are superimposed on imagery of skin, fishing nets, and hooks. Iverson’s heightenedawareness of racial injustice stems from her childhood in Prince Edward County, Virginia, which closed its public schools from 1958 to 1964 rather than allow desegregation. Although the schools reopened eight years before she was born, the memory of “massive resistance” was still alive during her own public school years near Farmville.