American

Deborah Muirhead

U.S. unknown
Untitled 2002.0012

---

For more than fifteen years Deborah Muirhead's paintings and prints have addressed her heritage. Genealogical research helped her to discover something of her own personal history, leading her to the slave plantation where her ancestors worked and to visits with descendents of the slave-owning family of her paternal great-grandparents. Always present in her work is the "presence of the ancestor," as she puts it. Her veiled and layered paintings and prints deal with the suppressed history of African Americans. In these two works, Muirhead provides fragments of the slave experience as two hands pulling cotton and as thumbprints, or "signatures" that accompany the new slaves's names.

 

BACK TO COLLECTION