Mary Turner 2001

Curator: This print by Maureen Cummins, titled Mary Turner, is a stark and painful piece. The text itself forms the figure, a silhouette filled with the brutal details of her lynching. Editor: It's incredibly direct. What do you see as its purpose, its intervention? Curator: It's an act of remembrance and resistance. Cummins forces us to confront the history of racial terror in the US, particularly the violence inflicted on Black women's bodies. The work resists erasure, demanding we acknowledge this history and its ongoing impact. How does the visual form contribute to this? Editor: The figure is almost ghost-like, but the words are so graphic, it's impossible to ignore the reality of what happened. It's a powerful contradiction. I hadn't thought about it as an intervention. Curator: Exactly, art can serve as activism. Remembering is a powerful statement.