Gesche Würfel | At the Hands of Persons Unknown

This past Friday, Pictura was honored to host the opening reception with Gesche Würfel on her series At the Hands of Persons Unknown. Here is the curatorial statement:

Lynching has been one of the most odious aspects of mob violence in the United States since the nineteenth century. Lynching emerged as one of the brutal tools of racial control to suppress black civil rights and to maintain white supremacy.

Gesche Würfel brings our attention to the women, who represent a sizable minority of lynching victims: 169 women, 169 names, burned into wood and installed here in a grid as a memorial. It’s very difficult to look directly at this unfathomable part of American history. But it’s also crucial that we keep it seared into our communal memory.

Würfel’s haunting prints of branches and limbs are abstracted in such a way that I begin to hear spirits cry out. With this project, she offers another way not to look away — to gather around the trees, those unwitting participants in the nation’s shame, this time in collective lament.

Photos from the opening: