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tour.description = SECCA Exhibition Summer 2021
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tour.name = Freeman
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HTMLText_0B1CF751_121B_B3B2_41AA_8DF6E24BB6F1.html = June 10 – September 12, 2021
"To meet Freeman Vines is to meet America itself. An artist, a luthier and a spiritual philosopher, Vines' life is a roadmap of the truths and contradictions of the American South. He remembers the hidden histories of the eastern North Carolina land on which his family has lived since enslavement. For over 50 years Vines has transformed materials culled from a forgotten landscape in his relentless pursuit of building a guitar capable of producing a singular tone that has haunted his dreams. From tobacco barns, mule troughs, and radio parts he has created hand-carved guitars, each instrument seasoned down to the grain by the echoes of its past life. In 2015, Vines befriends photographer Timothy Duffy and the two begin to document the guitars, setting off a mutual outpouring of the creative spirit. But when Vines acquires a mysterious stack of wood from the site of a lynching, Vines and Duffy find themselves each grappling with the spiritual unrest and the psychic toll of racial violence living in the very grain of America." – Zoe Van Buren
Freeman Vines Info
June 10 – September 12, 2021
To meet Freeman Vines is to meet America itself. An artist, a luthier and a spiritual philosopher, Vines' life is a roadmap of the truths and contradictions of the American South. He remembers the hidden histories of the eastern North Carolina land on which his family has lived since enslavement. For over 50 years Vines has transformed materials culled from a forgotten landscape in his relentless pursuit of building a guitar capable of producing a singular tone that has haunted his dreams. From tobacco barns, mule troughs, and radio parts he has created hand-carved guitars, each instrument seasoned down to the grain by the echoes of its past life. In 2015, Vines befriends photographer Timothy Duffy and the two begin to document the guitars, setting off a mutual outpouring of the creative spirit. But when Vines acquires a mysterious stack of wood from the site of a lynching, Vines and Duffy find themselves each grappling with the spiritual unrest and the psychic toll of racial violence living in the very grain of America." – Zoe Van Buren
Address
750 Marguerite Dr, Winston-Salem, NC 27106
SECCA
LOCATION
Address
750 Marguerite Dr, Winston-Salem, NC 27106
In 1900, 90% of all African Americans lived in the South. Four out of five of them lived in rural areas.
This changed between 1910 and 1970 as waves of African Americans moved to northern and western cities as part of the Great Migration. Nevertheless, even at the height of the migration, over half of the black population remained in the South, with significant portions in rural areas.
African Americans who remained in the rural South after World War II lived with recent memories of lynch mobs (such as the one that killed Oliver Moore) and faced direct threats from the white supremacist organizations whose membership ballooned during the Civil Rights Era. They also faced officially sanctioned discrimination. Even as Civil Rights reforms began to break the hold of Jim Crow laws, federal organizations like the USDA routinely discriminated against rural African Americans. Black farmers were repeatedly denied loans, access to programs, and basic information. Decades of these oppressive practices were documented in the 1999 class action lawsuit, Pigford v. Glickman, which resulted in some retributive payments for black farmers.
Recent sociological research has examined how a daily reality characterized by terrorist threats and prejudice resulted in collective trauma for rural African Americans. The effects of this trauma linger into the present as this population is disproportionately affected by mental and physical health issues. These issues are compounded by the lack of access to high quality health care that is a fact of life for much of the rural population in the US.
Today, African Americans make up about 12% of the national population, but they represent about 14% of the population in the rural South. Despite all of the challenges they have faced and continue to face, their culture remains vibrant. The music, dance, food, and religious practices of rural African Americans continue to indelibly shape the life and identity of America as a whole.
Freeman Vines’ work is just one example of this vibrant culture. His hanging tree guitars take wood that embodies both the Eastern North Carolina land and the traumatic history of the black people who inhabited this land and shape into something that speaks out defiantly against this legacy of trauma.
Dozens of armed and angry white men stormed the Edgecombe County jail at midnight on August 19, 1930. The mob was there to abduct and kill Oliver Moore who had been accused of sexual improprieties with two young white girls. Moore didn’t try to fight the mob. He had no chance against their numbers and weapons.
In a motorcade of vehicles with license plates removed, the mob drove about 20 miles south to Moore’s own house. They tied a plow line under his arms and hoisted him onto a tree limb. As he hung there helpless, the men shot Moore at least 15 times. Some reports said 200.
Moore was 29 years old. He was married. None of the surviving reports mention his wife’s whereabouts, but it’s possible that she was there at home witnessing the gruesome murder.
The mob lingered for hours. As sunrise approached, many people—hundreds, according to some newspaper reports—showed up to see Moore’s blood-drenched corpse hanging from the tree.
Sheriffs from Wilson and Edgecombe county arrived on the scene about 9:00AM and cut the plow line. Moore’s body lay on the ground for another hour or so as they filled out reports and deliberated about who had jurisdiction.
The Edgecombe County Sheriff, a district solicitor, and several outside parties (including the NAACP) conducted investigations into Oliver Moore’s lynching, but no one in the community would come forward with information. There were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people in this small rural community who could have identified the perpetrators of the crime. No one did.
This silence underscores the fact that Moore’s lynching was truly an act of terrorism. Moore’s murderers terrorized the entire community. Black men could imagine the same thing happening to them. Black women could imagine the same thing happening to their sons, husbands, brothers, or fathers. Even white women were terrorized as white men repeated the refrain that they should be grateful for such violence because it was a necessary chivalrous protection of their sexual purity and morality.
This was 1930—the dawn of the Great Depression—and the economic status of white farmers in rural Eastern North Carolina was only marginally better than the black laborers who worked their fields. Gripped by fear and uncertainty, these white men turned to terrorism. In doing so, they traumatized an entire community. As the silence around Moore’s murder remained unbroken for decades, so did the collective trauma.
Freeman Vines said this about working on some of the guitars in this exhibit: “I felt the wood was trying to talk to me, trying to tell me something.” We might imagine that the voices coming through the wood were some of the voices silenced by acts of terror like Oliver Moore’s lynching. Perhaps this exhibit can spark new dialogue, moving beyond generational silence and helping to heal the collective trauma of the past.
The title of this exhibit—Hanging Tree Guitars—invokes transformation. Freeman Vines’ work shows us how wood that was once an instrument of terror can be transformed into an instrument of art and music.
At its most powerful, art is transformative. Because of this, art is crucial to the ongoing struggles for civil rights In the United States.
The Civil Rights Movement that occurred in the US in the 1950s and 60s was an effort to transform society. While it achieved a measure of success, aspects of the struggle continue. We see this, for example, in the ways contemporary African American communities are plagued by police brutality and mass incarceration.
History shows us that the lasting transformation of society requires not just new laws and policies, but the transformation of the individuals who make up society. People have to be changed in their minds, hearts, and spirits.
We need art for this kind of transformation.
African American artists in the South created a tradition of visual art that embodied the notion of transformation at the heart of the Civil Rights Struggle. Mixed-media creators like Thornton Dial, Purvis Young, and Lonnie Holley all used everyday objects in their work; anything from plywood to sticks to tires to rope. These artists transformed the things around them into deeply expressive creations. Their works articulate things that words cannot. They reveal the interconnectedness of all things, human and non-human. And they show us—like a mirror—the desire for transformation within each of us. Thornton Dial said in a mid-1990s interview: “The struggles that we all have did, those struggles can teach us how to make improvement for the future. Art is like a bright star up ahead in the darkness of the world.”
Freeman Vines is part of this tradition of transformative artists. His work embodies art’s ability to bring the darkness of the past into the light.
African American novelist and playwright James Baldwin wrote in a 1962 essay, “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
Art can bring us face to face with what we want to change. And it can give us a way to face it. A collective reluctance to face our history of racial inequality ensures that such inequality will continue. But bringing it into the open gives us a chance to transform ourselves and our society. Freeman Vines’ work opens one door to that possibility.
Materials: Black walnut (from hanging tree)
Materials: Pine
"They did it because they were mean. They wanted you to do the work, but they didn’t want you to be a man. The “yes sir,” that’s what they wanted.
Generations of people have changed, things ain’t changed. Same hatred and animosity as they always had."
-Freeman Vines
Materials: Black walnut (from hanging tree)
Materials: Black walnut (from hanging tree)
Materials: Recycled poplar from chest drawer, recycled mahogany from a chifforobe, recycled guitar neck
"I ain’t interested in material things. They mean nothing to me.
You take everything that’s in our body and it’s contained right down there in that dirt. When you think about it, that whole great big body you’ve got there, what controls it fits on the head of a pin.
Death is the price everybody pays for living. The beginning of life, you can put it on the head of a pin. And then you grow to be a big person.
Fear has never been a friend of mine. Fear and death—Death can be a friend to some people but fear ain’t never been a friend of mine.
It’s hard to scare me."
-Freeman Vines
Materials: Oak, recycled guitar neck, sheet metal, recycled pickups, bridge
"And I’ll tell you something else that bothers me. It don’t supposed to but it do.
All of Fountain, on both sides, all the way back to the other store down there, both sides. Was a little town in here in the colonial days. Moses Jefferson, recorded in the history, had 125 slaves, and ain’t no cemetery around here where they’re buried.
And they lived in all kinds of cabins and houses over there. House there, a house yonder, one in the middle of the field, two or three down yonder. This was a village. I still ain’t figured out where they buried them at. Moses Jefferson came somewhere from up North, I think Pennsylvania.
I wonder where they buried them slaves at. I sure don’t want to be walking across their graves."
– Freeman Vines
The Ku Klux Klan has a long history in North Carolina. Formed in Tennessee immediately following the Civil War, the white supremacist organization showed up in North Carolina soon after. Although sometimes falling dormant, the Klan would resurrect during times of economic uncertainty and social turmoil.
The Klan became particularly active in North Carolina during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. An offshoot group—the United Klans of America (UKA)—recruited heavily in North Carolina. By the mid-1960s there were more Klan members in North Carolina than all the other Southern states combined. In 1965, Klan rallies were the most attended political events in the state.
Eastern North Carolina contained the largest concentration of Klan members: three times as many per capita as the Piedmont, and more than six times as many per capita as the Mountains.
Economic instability was widespread in rural Eastern North Carolina. Pitt County’s male unemployment rate in 1960 was twice as high as the average rate in the Piedmont. New industrial jobs were showing up in the area, but some white men believed that Civil Rights reforms would result in these jobs being taken by black workers. Such economic fears fueled the Klan’s rapid expansion in Eastern North Carolina.
In 1964, the Klan held rallies in Eastern North Carolina every Saturday night. The rallies included food, live music, and hate-filled speeches. They culminated after dark with the burning of a giant cross. By 1965 the Klan was holding nightly rallies in the region. They often preceded these with daytime street walks—marches through the main thoroughfare of the closest town. The Klan also erected billboards along highways in Eastern North Carolina with slogans such as “You are in the heart of Klan country.” And they regularly burned crosses in the yards of people they saw as enemies.
The Klan’s public presence in North Carolina had largely dissipated by the 1970s. Yet, negative effects linger in areas where the Klan flourished, such as Eastern North Carolina. As sociologist David Cunningham spells out, these areas continue to experience higher-than-average rates of violent crime in part because of the ways that the Klan had “disrupted community cohesion, undermined generalized trust, and challenged the perceived legitimacy of local authority.”
Artistic expressions—like the work of Freeman Vines—can ignite dialogue, helping us to expose a dark past to the light and move beyond these lingering legacies of violence.
Materials: Poplar, recycled guitar neck, paint.
“If you ever notice – the oak tree stays an oak, a pine stays a pine. A man is the most destructive, evilest thing, that’s ever been.
Know how I know? I’m one.”
– Freeman Vines