Reclaiming History: Art Installation Honors Ancestors Enslaved at Farmington
January 20, 2025
By Stephanie Godward, Communications and Marketing Director, College of Arts & Sciences
Rebekah Flowers amplifies her great-grandmother's voice with audio recordings in an art installation depicting a historical plantation living room, challenging how narratives about slavery are presented to spark change-making conversations for the future.
Incorporating mirrors into the installation, in which viewers reflect on the roles they play in the retelling of this history, Flowers’s work surrounds the missing narratives around the past enslavement of her own family – and others – at historical plantations today. It explores the generational trauma experienced by Black individuals visiting plantations that have been transformed into museums, where stories are often more focused on topics like architecture, grandeur, and design, Flowers states.
"This is about my family, and my family’s experience, and I was able to show it visually. When you're authentic and intentional, you can do anything to make tangible change,” Flowers said. “Affecting one person or even making one person think critically about something is more than enough. And if more people do that, then we could have hundreds or thousands or millions of people thinking critically.”
An MLK scholar who is double majoring to pursue a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Psychology degree, this project allowed her interests and passions to come together in art that has an impact on the community.
“There are a lot of intersecting things that happened with both of my majors, because my interest in research really focuses on the ideas of how generational trauma affects the Black community,” Flowers said.
Farmington Historic Plantation was home to John Speed, his family, and as many as 70 enslaved people. Flowers’s own family members are descendants of Abraham and Rosanna Hayes, who were enslaved at Farmington and then freed after the enactment of the 14th amendment.
The mock living room art installation, entitled, “Our Old Kentucky Home,” was inspired by her family’s very personal and painful connections to Farmington. Flowers’s great-grandmother narrates her own life story, recounting her childhood, her grandparents' experience of being enslaved, and living in a home provided by the Speed family after slavery. However, after her grandparents passed away, the Speeds reclaimed this house. Despite this, her great-grandmother reflected on the excitement of moving to the city. The installation highlights the concept of home and place as central to the family's history and journey into society post-slavery.
Exploring her family's connection to Farmington and their relation to the Speed family, who founded the plantation in 1816, brings to light the need to face the harsh realities of history head on with respect for families impacted by slavery.
“I was really able to employ the wisdom of my family members. We looked into our familial archives, and so there have been some strides made in the last 10 or so years where they've gathered a lot of information on our ancestry and were able to connect some of the dots that connect us back to Farmington Plantation. And I did this work as a form of institutional critique and to combat the way that people see plantations as museums or spaces to visit or experience as entertainment; I think oftentimes plantations really sanitize the past.”
A new sensitivity and awareness are needed for these reasons and more, Flowers states.
“As someone who has visited and gone there as a Black person who still lives in the area in which her ancestors were enslaved, I feel that it is my duty to do this work to make sure that I'm able to honor my ancestors and showcase the resilience of Black culture in Louisville,” she states.
The installation that Flowers created is a play on how plantations are presented to the public today, designed to invite viewers to step into it as an experience, to examine history – and themselves – more closely, and to learn about the personal stories of her ancestors in the process.
“I'm breaking up the space, and so when you get closer and you evaluate it, and you see what's on the walls, and you see what text is there, it's telling you a little something different,” Flowers said.
The use of three mirrors invites the audience to evaluate the role that they play in the space.
“You have to evaluate what that means for you and what role you play in the sanitization of history,” Flowers states.
As the installation was presented at the end of the fall semester, Flowers said she was approached by a few white viewers who were impacted and inspired to take action as a result of the piece.
"They were telling me about how their families descended from enslavers, and this made them really think about what role they could play in addressing their own history and teaching their children about it, without it surrounding the idea of white shame being attached to it,” Flowers said.
Her goal is to use art to make people uncomfortable in a way that spurs critical thinking and conversation that leads to effective change.
“What conversations need to be had about this with people who benefit and continue to benefit from the institution of slavery? Why do you go to these places and what do you do when you're there? Why do these places exist if not to tell the correct version of history?” she asks.