The “Politics of Proof” is a living battle. We see this today in the work of Trudith Dyer (Upper Mattaponi), whose 2019 smixed-media piece, Paper Genocide, commemorates her great-grandmother Mollie Wade Holmes Adams (1881 – 1977)’ resistance to reclassification by the Virginia Bureau.

Likewise, Coulter Fussell’s “quilt-works” use video skills on chiffon to map modern landscapes of memory, “testing what we think we know” about the Southern places that eugenicists once sought to homogenize. Her “quilt-works” are constructed from donated community textiles to test what we think about Southern place and memory.