Frances Cathryn is an independent scholar, museum worker, and community organizer in Kingston, New York, who fights to recontextualize stories as they’ve been told to us. Her work confronting racist histories and the myth of neutrality in museums helped her start wip projects, where she looks forward to building something different. Frances has written about collective memory and public art, material histories of child design, and memorials to the coronavirus, and she has been featured in the Los Angeles Review of Books, ARTnews magazine, and the Museum of Modern Art, among others. She has also held workshops and talks at MASS MoCA, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, among others.
In Esopus, a small town in upstate New York, a monument dedicated to Sojourner Truth was erected in 2009 (fig. 1). Truth was born in the area then known as Swartekill, some time in 1797, and lived in bondage in … Continue reading “Saying Her Name: What Monuments to Sojourner Truth Can Teach Us about Memorializing Black Lives”
