In Our Own Backyard

by Willoughby Lucas Hastings

Originally from Huntsville, Alabama, and currently based in Rockland, Maine, Willoughby Lucas Hastings is an interdisciplinary research-based artist working primarily in textiles, photography, video, and sculpture. Her work examines the aesthetics, traditions, and systems of whiteness, especially within the American South and New England. She thinks critically about the environments we inhabit and how they can maintain or confront our personal biases. She produces works of self and societal critique that often incorporate textiles and photography to document and subvert the material culture of whiteness. As well as, producing protest banners and protest garments which are made in solidarity with queer, feminist, and antiracist activism and are constructed with donated materials.

Willoughby’s show is an ongoing series of redacted digital photographs are directly informed by the public Huntsville Historic Homes Database. Each location corresponds to the compiled list of 41 properties identified in the Database throughout greater Huntsville, Alabama that either openly acknowledged or substantially implied the enslavement of Africans and African Americans historically at that property.