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“What Are We Claiming?” puts Cheryl Harper’s family heirlooms
from the Holocaust and American slavery in conversation with
rod jones ii’s imagined family past, which draws on mediums and
Courtesy of InLiquid
concepts from his own life.

gled aft er her mother-in-law died. She
went up to her in-laws’ attic and dis-
covered a collection of Georgian silver
— a result of family wealth acquired by
enslaving Black people on their fami-
ly’s plantations.

Combining the processing of her
family’s strife during the Holocaust
with her extended family’s complicity
in the American disgrace of slavery,
Harper thought up “What Are We
Claiming?” as a way to place these con-
fl icting histories in conversation with
one another, but she understood that
the narrative of the exhibit, which orig-
inally debuted in Lynchburg, Virginia,
wasn’t complete.

She wanted to introduce a Black art-
ist into the space whose work would
complement hers and highlight a dif-
ferent American history. jones, a Gary,
Indiana-born artist who lectures at the
University of Pennsylvania, was a good
match, according to InLiquid Executive
Director Rachel Zimmerman.

“He is a deep thinker ... he was open
to the challenge and was able to sort of
stance his ground in a very thoughtful,
positive way,” Zimmerman said.

In addition to the challenge of work-
ing with an artist with whom he had
never collaborated, jones was tasked
with creating family heirlooms with-
out the tactile inspiration
Harper had from her
family. “A lot of the images and
pieces, the fi gures that I
was making were com-
ing from this world that
I hadn’t defi ned,” jones
said. “I didn’t know what
it was, but it was refl ective of a lot of
conversations I was having with my
friends and family, stories I’ve heard,
things that I had experienced.”
jones created the foundation of many
of his pieces with papier-mache but
molded the skeletons of his pieces with
chicken wire. His mother had told him
that his grandfather, whom he had
never met, used wire sculpting in his
works. Inspired by childhood scenes of play-
ing with children with Technicolor
beads in their braided hair, jones opted
to adorn the visible wires in his pieces
with hand-strewn beadwork. He drew
on his interests as an adult, such as his
zodiac signs, to inform the shapes of
his pieces. He also considers his iden-
tity and the history he creates as he
lives his life.

“I oft en think about the many ways
society has failed me personally, as a
Black man, a Black queer man, and
moments in life where I didn’t feel
like was full or like I didn’t show up
enough,” jones said.

Th e unspoken dialogue between
Harper’s and jones’ pieces is one of the
many reckonings taking place today,
Zimmerman said.

“A lot of us live in this world of not
knowing,” she said.

With greater access to academic
texts, social media and ancestry sites
and resources, people can discover
more about their past. While having
more answers can provide comfort to
some families, it can also complicate
truths families once believed about
their pasts.

“It’s important to sort of humanize
some of these aspects of real people
who are really aff ected by these things,”
Zimmerman said. “And there’s beauty
in it, and there’s pain in it.” JE
srogelberg@midatlanticmedia.com www.jewishexponent.com
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