Family Albums

This ongoing series pays homage to my ancestors and immediate family.

My mom died in 1987 at the age of sixty-six and my father placed the Family Albums in my care because he knew I was archiving things and would be a good caretaker. My father would pass in 1992 and I became the archivist for the Clan they had started. Images blend family photographs, historical records, and my mother’s wonderful handwriting from her composition book that recorded major events in the raising of her eight children and fifty-year marriage. It records struggles during the 1930s Depression and the death of my father’s mother at 33, which left my parents with his three younger brothers to care for at the very beginning of the marriage. Despite the hardships and loss of two infant children, both parents deeply loved and enjoyed caring for my uncles and their own eight children as well as providing support for my mother's two sisters.

My aim is to carry this series both backward and forward in time, from capturing the legacies since slavery of the Edmunds (EFA), Northern Virginia; Hariston Clans (HFA), Salisbury, North Carolina; and the growing Allan and Anne (Pitts) Clan, Philadelphia. I strive for the art to convey universal ideas about family, and particularly how resilient the African American family has been.