Ashland memorial remembering Black lives rebuilt after repeated vandalism

The Say Their Names Memorial in Ashland was created in 2020 in response to the murders of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery. The memorial honored other Black lives lost to violence including Aidan Ellison who was killed by a white man in Ashland after complaining about Ellison’s music.

The memorial has been vandalized three times and the most recent incident happened earlier this year, the Rogue Valley Times reported. Community organizers gathered to repair the memorial earlier this month and are planning a more permanent installation in Ashland Creek Park. Micah BlackLight is a multidisciplinary artist and teacher. His design has been selected for the permanent installation. Cassie Preskenis is a community activist and public art advocate. They join us.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:

Dave Miller: This is Think Out loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We start today with the Say Their Names Memorial in Ashland. It was created in 2020 in response to the murders of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery. The memorial honored other Black lives lost to violence including Aidan Ellison, who was killed by a white man in Ashland after that man complained about the volume of Ellison’s music. The Memorial has been vandalized three times since residents put it up and three times community organizers have gathered to recreate it as the Rogue Valley Times recently reported. Now a permanent memorial is in the works. Micah BlackLight is a multidisciplinary artist and teacher whose design has been selected for the permanent installation. Cassie Preskenis is a community activist and public art advocate. They both join us now. It’s great to have both of you on the show.

Micah BlackLight: It’s wonderful to be here.

Miller: Micah first, for people who haven’t seen the memorial, the t-shirt Memorial. Can you describe what it looks like when it’s in good shape, when it has not been erased or vandalized?

BlackLight: Actually, I would love to put this one to Cassie because she was just there, within a couple of days ago.

Miller: Ok, Cassie. What is it supposed to look like?

Cassie Preskenis: Good question. When it was first put up in 2020 it was put up in the middle of the night by a group of activists that no one, at the time, knew who they were. And it was very intentional. At the time it was almost like you didn’t want to touch it because it was so special. It was almost magical the way that it appeared. After that vandalization happened, it became living art that the community started interacting with.

And so what it’s supposed to look like honestly changes almost day by day. Sometimes what it’s supposed to look like is that the elements have been interacting with it and some of the shirts that are there are even a little bit tattered and impacted by the elements right now. There’s a lot of new shirts that have been put up recently and they’ve been decorated by, I wanna say, dozens of Ashland residents. So they all look different. What it’s supposed to look like really is just a well-tended community piece of art that is preserved by the residents of Ashland. So it looks like hundreds of shirts hung up, or strewn up along the fence. I try to stay away from using the phrase that I just used, which is hung up. But they’re all placed up intentionally along a very, very long fence line in a public park with beautiful mountains behind it. And over time people have added fake flowers to the installation and other messages of solidarity. There’s a Black Lives Matter flag. So, but it’s, it’s changed so much over time.

Miller: Micah, do you remember when you first saw this memorial?

BlackLight: Mhm. It was kind of mind blowing to me because I don’t know if your listeners know but Ashland is a very small, predominantly white, town. And for it to have this along the fence [which is] along Railroad Park, is quite long because the park itself is very long and narrow. To see so many shirts with the names of Black and Brown folk who had been murdered, all of the names are names of folk who have been murdered due to racism and a lot of them, due to police brutality. And I’m familiar with a bunch of those names. So to see them strung up, put up that way, in this place, in this town, by white residents was hugely impactful. Just really, really powerful.

Miller: That last part seems like something worth lingering on. You’re saying ‘by white residents.’ Why is that something to point to?

BlackLight: Because as a Black resident, as a Black human and having spoken to many other Black humans, it can be very isolating for some people living in a town that is predominantly white. It can be very isolating to hear about accounts of police brutality gone unpunished, unconvicted, most times uncharged. It can be extremely isolating to feel like only other residents who happen to share your color can recognize or acknowledge or become aware of the plight of so many of us just trying to live our lives. So to see white residents put up a response like this, put up an installation like this and come back together to do it again and again is massive because for a lot of folk, myself included, it makes us feel a-seen, b-recognized and c-acknowledged.

Miller: Cassie Preskenis, can you give us a sense for what it’s been like for you to see this memorial repeatedly vandalized or erased?

Preskenis: I am a white resident in a very, very white community as Micah mentioned. And so I will first name that the impact emotionally on me is, I would imagine, quite different than it might be on someone who’s in a Black body. For me each time it comes down, I feel distressed. Even just talking about it, my whole gut just got really tight and I feel angry and then the rebuild starts to happen and I feel so overwhelmingly grateful to have people in the community that come together. And almost invigorated at the opportunity and Micah uses this word a lot in his work, but the opportunity that it provides to us to redress racism in our community, to not look away from it and to really be in a situation where we get to recreate something that’s so powerful and so beautiful in a totally new way. That represents that moment and those people who are coming together. And the beauty in that simultaneously exists with the devastation of the memorial being taken down over and over again, if that makes sense. It’s sort of a duality experience.

Miller: Micah, can you describe your design that you proposed to city leaders and that was accepted? It’s called “Crystallizing Our Call.”

BlackLight: Yes, I would love to. Basically, it’s going to be a 10 to 12 ft tall sculpture. It will be of a figure sitting, winged. The wings come up above his head and go to the ground and they’re in a sort of dome over his head and they cover his body - and not even cover his body - but they come sort of in a dome that covers the entire thing and it’s to cover it from the actual spears, arrows, hail of weather and rain and sleet and snow. But it’s also symbolically to shield from classism, racism, and hatred , the wings as dome, wings as protection, wings as sanctuary. The figure is seated and he looks kind of Afrofuturist. I’m not sure if the viewers are familiar with that particular movement, but it basically speaks to speculative science fiction futures where Black people are excellent, where we are every bit as present as any other color or any other ethnicity.

And so the idea was that this figure, this Afrofuturistic winged figure is sitting there with a huge tome on his lap. And the tome opens up in three different directions though it’s a book. But it opens up in three different directions to the front and to both sides. Every name that is currently adorning the t-shirts on the Railroad Park installation, that Say Their Names Memorial will be etched into the book on this figure’s lap. When they put out the call for art, one of the things was to try our best to make it so that these names that are currently adorning the fence, we know that the t-shirts are only going to last so long, even with upkeep. The elements and everything take its toll. They’re just regular t-shirts. So I wanted to make sure that these names don’t just become a fad or a passing thing that was really cool, for a time. But every single name on these shirts was a life, right? They were living breathing human beings with wants and dreams and desires. And so to have all of their names captured in this book, makes it such that this permanent memorial is to hold us to account for what has transpired in the past while looking forward to the future at a future where that’s not the case anymore, where we don’t need to ever add any other names to any other memorials like this.

And then at his chest, right at the place where the base of his neck is, there’s a woman’s face. That is to represent the nurturing, patient, understanding, empathetic energies that we as people are going to need to embrace and hold, as well as the more assertive, the more just strident energies to hold us to account. But it’s also not to beat people over the head with it, but to actually come from a place of communication, understanding and know that we’re going to have to meet and bridge gaps and divides between folk of all different colors, races, statures and classes if we’re ever gonna’ move forward. So it’s a figure who’s sitting with a book on his lap and wings over his head, looking ahead.

Miller: What went through your mind when your design was accepted?

BlackLight: So the truth is, [at] first, before I did my design, I made it a point to tell anyone who would listen, that it was gonna’ be mine. I wanted it really badly and I was going to get chosen. So I just made it reality by telling people before I’d even design anything. That’s just how I hold space.

Miller: So you manifested it in the world?

BlackLight: I manifested the heaven out of it. Yes.

Miller: But there was still a panel of other human beings who looked at your design and looked at others and then made you a finalist and then said, ‘yeah, we’re going to go with Micah’?

BlackLight: Yes. So I had to hold two realities simultaneously. In one world, it was the one where there was a possibility where I wouldn’t be chosen. And in the other, there was zero possibility of that and I would be chosen. And so I just held on to the one where I would be chosen knowing that it was possible in some other world that I wouldn’t be. So when they told me it was simultaneous relief and absolute ecstatic bliss because I freaked out. I was super, super happy.

Miller: What is the funding going to look like in terms of how much it’s gonna cost to build this? And where is that money going to come from?

BlackLight: Excellent question. We’re looking at upwards of $160,000 to make this all reality. Part of that is due to ridiculous supply chain stuff based off of COVID and the current market prices and skyrocketing material prices, things like that and just vagaries. So I’ve also been told to plan for the things that I don’t know anything about, the setbacks and stuff that I can’t see. So that’s all factored in as well. And what we’re looking at is a whole lot of different kinds of funding because we, as part of our remit, have to come up with all of it just about. We’re looking at in-kind, we’re looking at personal individual donations, we’re looking at large scale donations, we’re looking at grants. We have a steering committee, but we’re looking to find some folk who are willing to volunteer their time who happen to be grantwriters, who happen to be really good with fundraising. We’re looking at all options that we can because it’s gonna take a lot.

Miller: Cassie, what do you hope that this permanent memorial is going to mean for the community?

Preskenis: Your question, Dave, made me think about my son who is now almost 10, but at the time that the Say Their Names installation appeared in town, he had just turned eight, maybe seven. And he actually recreated his own t-shirt memorial in front of our house. He just started taking his own little kid shirts and turning them inside out and writing names on them and learning the story of the people whose names he was writing. And it grew eventually, I think he had 35 shirts. And he so eloquently spoke in front of the City Council in support of this project. At one point he said, ‘my school is down the street from the park where this installation will be put.’ And, in his words as a little boy, he said, ‘I look forward to the day that we go on a school field trip and walk up to the park and learn about Black lives and about why they matter.’ And I think that is exactly the heart of it. I think it’s about, as a community, coming together and saying ‘this is important to us.’

It’s about changing the culture in Ashland to be intentionally inclusive, not just ‘we’re a progressive community, of course we’re inclusive,’ but intentionally, going to the park and not just learning the names on the memorial, but interacting with the memorial, talking about how we can build a more accepting and a more vibrant community together. And I think that’s really the heart of this installation. It would be the first piece of public art.

Since this installation project began, I joined the Ashland Public Arts Advisory Committee. And this would be the first piece of public art we have in our community that’s done by a Black artist and that’s huge. So for me, my goal in life really is about building togetherness. And I would like to have the opportunity to live in a community that is more vibrant and where people are more engaged in coming out and having conversations with each other about what we really want to be as a community. So that would be my goal, my vision.

Miller: Cassie Preskenis and Micah BlackLight, thank you both for joining us today.

BlackLight: Thank you so much for having us.

Miller: Cassie Preskenis is a community activist and a public art advocate. Micah BlackLight is a multidisciplinary artist and teacher and coach, the designer of the permanent memorial that is in the works right now in Ashland that followed the much less than permanent Say Their Names Memorial for Black Lives.

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