Wells was an anti-lynching crusader because she had three friends who opened a grocery store and it was competing against a white grocery store. And they don’t exist now because of systemic policy and inequity and access to loans and land. These Black communities in many cases were destroyed because they were competing against white businesses, and doing well. Q: What do you mean by economic violence?Ī: These communities existed in every part of the country, even Phoenix. We are talking about why they existed and how they thrived and how beautiful it was to have these Black ecosystems with shops of every type, not just barber shops and restaurants. I was a visiting professor at George Washington University and we decided we needed to have some kind of presence, so we created the website. It’s about, why do we memorialize the destruction of a community versus the thriving aspect of the community before the massacre? We were talking about this project, and then COVID happened and delayed everything. Question: Last year, you created an interactive website called “Three Black Wall Streets.” Was that the precursor to this project?Īnswer: I wanted to do something to memorialize the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre (which happened on May 31, 1921), where 34 city blocks were burned and 6,000 Black people were arrested. I met with the folks at ASU over two years ago. Here, he answers some questions about his latest installation:
Rucker is an iCubed Arts Research Fellow and Assistant Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia and Curator for Creative Collaboration for VCUarts.Īrtist Paul Rucker looks over the digital interactive components for his "Banking While Black" installation at Sun Devil Stadium on March 14. Last summer, he exhibited at the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, where his installation “Storm in the Time of Shelter” consisted of 48 mannequins dressed in Ku Klux Klan-style hoods and robes that Rucker created out of African kente cloth and other colorful patterns. Rucker was part of the recent ASU Art Museum exhibit “Undoing Time: Art and Histories of Incarceration,” in which his installation focused on Geronimo, the Apache leader and prisoner of war. “Black people are an integral part of building this country.” Black history is American history,” he said. “A lot of my work is not about Black history, it’s about American history. He has a collection of more than 20,000 historical artifacts, including postcards of lynchings and branding irons used to mark Black people as enslaved.
Much of Rucker’s work expresses the lingering effects of historical racism and the erasure of history. I went to the salvage company and saw the deposit table and thought, ‘I’ll do a banking project with the deposit table.’ And they looked at me and said, ‘You know, we have the rest of the bank.’ ” “This bank is post-Jim Crow era, from the 1930s and ‘40s. “Richmond was the capital of the Confederacy, and banking and wealth in that city is tied to enslavement,” he said.
The physical installation re-creates a walkable open-air bank space, complete with teller booths, deposit tables, marble and slate slabs, brass fittings, chandeliers and carved doors from Rucker’s personal collection of vintage bank components. The installation re-creates an actual bank, with artifacts such as a teller’s window and deposit tables, which Rucker bought after an old bank was demolished in his hometown of Richmond. “It’s economic violence and coordinated exclusion.” And it’s the narrative of why those thriving Black communities are not there now,” Rucker said. “It’s about Black excellence and Black people thriving in these communities, and the aspect of them being destroyed, and the overall aspect of people not knowing about the thriving.
#VIOLENCE OF THE SUN ORIGIN FREE#
It’s free and open to the public.Īrtist Paul Rucker wants viewers to experience both the joy and the horror of the “Three Black Wall Streets” of Tulsa, Oklahoma Richmond, Virginia and Durham, North Carolina. “Banking While Black,” an interactive, multimedia experience at the Coca-Cola Sun Deck at Sun Devil Stadium, opened March 15 and runs through April 17. MaSun Devil Stadium experience shows how once-thriving Black communities were destroyedĪ new art exhibit at Arizona State University is focusing attention on three Black communities that flourished a century ago, and the mob violence that destroyed them.
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