Wendell Berry from The Hidden Wound, Counterpoint Press, Berkeley CA 1970. ““It occurs to me that, for a man whose life from the beginning has been conditioned by the lives of black people, I have had surprisingly little to say about them in my other writings. Perhaps this is justifiable…and yet it is an avoidance…For whatever reasons, good or bad, I have been unwilling until now to open in myself what I have known all along to be a wound – a historical wound, prepared centuries ago to come alive in me at my birth like a hereditary disease, and to be augmented and deepened by my life. If I had thought it was only the black people who have suffered from the years of slavery and racism, then I could have dealt fully with the matter long ago; I could have filled myself with pity for them, and would no doubt have enjoyed it a great deal and thought highly of myself. But I am sure it is not so simple as that. If white people have suffered less obviously from racism than black people, they have nevertheless suffered greatly; the cost has been greater perhaps than we can yet know. If the white man has inflicted the wound of racism upon black men, the cost has been that he would receive the mirror image of that wound into himself. As the master, or as a member of the dominant race, he has felt little compulsion to acknowledge it or speak of it; the more painful it has grown the more deeply he has hidden it within himself. But the wound is there, and it is a profound disorder, as great a damage in his mind as it is in his society.”

Facing the auction block, their easy on the eyes hearts is one of 21 Ancestor Spirit Portraits. The portraits feature local African Americans who represent all ages and genders just like those sold in the square. They are printed on translucent scrims, allowing viewers to literally see through them and for light to shine through them. Woven into these figures are the longitude and latitude of other prominent sites asking viewers to consider the broader connections of enslaved people sold at auction and the vast histories of enslavement.

hope ground into a powder and a lovesome people are 2 iconic Ancestor Spirit Portraits facing Broadway. The portraits bring presence to the historic role of enslaved Africans in nation building. “At the heart of the project is the concept of connection. The portraits connect to each other. Visitors connect to the images as they look at and through them. Histories of Atlantic slavery, from sites of the slave trade in West Africa to sites of enslavement in the United States, connect through the coordinates provided. Each piece asks viewers to imagine being moved through the ocean and across the country. These connections are powerful. Lexington, KY, is connected to sites all over the American South through the enslaved people who passed through the city as chattel”. Vanessa Holden, Associate Professor of History and African American & Africana Studies.

The Ancestor Spirit Portraits were created by photographing contemporary African Americans standing in the gap as visual representations of Ancestors. They embody Mother, Father, Brother, Sister to form connected images that convey the transitional dignity of the African to African American individual and family – imagery mostly missing in America’s visual history.

“I am writing as a specialist in the history of American slavery in support of the public art installation, I Was Here. The project, an “on the street museum” public art installation, asks everyone who stops in Lexington, Kentucky’s central courthouse square to engage with the city’s history as a node of the internal slave trade. As a site of redevelopment, the courthouse square currently hosts commercial properties, entertainment venues, and the city’s most central farmer’s market. The project serves as a ghostly reminder of the space’s previous life as the site of one of the most important slave markets in the Middle South. Layering history, text, and at times visitor’s own reflections in the plate glass of store windows, I Was Here significantly contributes to public engagement with this important history." Vanessa Holden, Associate Professor of History and African American & Africana Studies.

This site was an enormous jail to hold the enslaved before sale. Lexington has the first ‘on the street museum’ in the country created to shift our understanding of the foundational role Africans played in the creation of our city. Next up, Inwood, NYC for the Dyckman Farmhouse. The IWH work in Inwood will integrate Ancestor Spirit Portraits into spiritually and historically significant sites across the city. The project is a model for the country.

History is a narrative-based medium that is often viewed as factual, even when it tells a story that purposefully omits or alters the truth. Controlling the narrative controls the reality of a situation and how it is understood over time. The I Was Here project exposes the ancestral roots that exist within buildings, cities, and ourselves. This site is one of many where enslaved people were contained before sale.

“And I want to be cured; I want to be free of the wound myself, and I do not want to pass it on to my children. Perhaps this is only wishful thinking; perhaps such a thing is not to be done by one man, or in one generation. Surely a man would have to be almost dangerously proud to think himself capable of it. And so maybe I am really saying only that I feel an obligation to make the attempt, and that I know if I fail to make at least the attempt I forfeit any right to hope that the world will become better than it is now” Wendell Berry

The I Was Here project is at the intersection of history, the arts and technology. In 2020, the project received a significant award from CodaWorx. In a collaborative new venture CODAWorx formed a partnership with Yes, We are Mad to create a new company, CodaMade empowering artists and communities to create artworks that bridge the physical public art world with the digital art sphere. Much of what we have accomplished can be tracked to this support.

What I Was Here accomplishes with its public art and public history installations is a mindful, reverent, and powerful acknowledgment of American history; history that may be misunderstood, misinterpreted, ignored, or simply forgotten. The project invites as much as it prods visitors to allow this acknowledgment to hold public space and to accept the echoes layered into the project’s name, I Was Here. The project exposes the ancestral roots that exist within buildings, cities, and ourselves.

Two Ancestor Spirit Portraits -cataclysmic, leaf by leaf and his monsoon begins hang in the windows of Tandy Park looking out onto the site of the auction block. Berry continues , “This wound is in me, as complex and deep in my flesh as blood and nerves. I have borne it all my life, with varying degrees of consciousness, but always carefully, always with the most delicate consideration for the pain I would feel if I were somehow forced to acknowledge it. But now I am increasingly aware of the opposite compulsion. I want to know, as fully and exactly as I can, what the wound is and how much I am suffering from it.