Dr. Lesley Harris August 2021 Grant

Collective healing, in which members of Black communities come together for mutual support, validation, and upliftment has been advocated for as a trauma recovery practice. Through arts-based, socially engaged research, “The Promise” aims to understand lived experiences of African Americans in Louisville who have experienced racism and gun violence, with the potential for empowerment, social justice action, and arts-based healing.  

The Promise will begin with a kickoff event featuring a workshop with Sanford Biggers, an interdisciplinary artist who works in film/video, installation, sculpture, music, and performance. Biggers seeks to memorialize and honor victims of police violence in the U.S., pointing towards recent transgressions and elevating the stories of specific individuals to combat historical amnesia. This will begin 9-weeks of workshops in which participants will make artwork with guns donated through a gun drive. The remaining weeks will take place at a foundry and participants can create their own artwork using melted gunmetal and other materials.  

Embedded within workshops will be a facilitation of critical conversations around grief, gun violence, and racial healing based on Christina Sharpe’s book entitled “In the Wake: On Blackness and Being.” The framework for these conversations will center on “wake work” as labor within the space of paradoxes surrounding black citizenship, identity, and civil rights. 

Through artmaking and dialogue, participants become catalysts for personal and community change. This program will culminate into a public, arts-advocacy exhibition at the Speed Art Museum in the Spring of 2022.