Auburn Professors Collaborate on Emancipation Exhibition

“Out of Whole Cloth: Marking History & Making Home, 1865–1910” is on display at the Wallace Center for Arts and Reconciliation, on the former Wallace Plantation outside of Birmingham.

Elijah Gaddis from the College of Liberal Arts (CLA) and Finkel from the College of Architecture, Design and Construction (CADC) collaborated with Birmingham-based narrative studio 1504 to examine three groups of Black peoples associated with the Wallace Plantation—unknown enslaved and formerly enslaved individuals; the post-emancipation families of the Datchers, Bakers and McGinnis; and present-day descendants.

“We want people to know more about the process of Emancipation and how free people made new lives in this incredibly tumultuous period of American history,” Gaddis said.

The exhibition features postcard reprints of tintypes—a type of photograph on a thin piece of metal popular in the late 19^th century—depicting emancipated individuals that guests can carry around the site as they move throughout the property.

History is also presented in a stitched composition of cyanotype cloths—a photographic printing process that transferred the handwritten land deed that gave the Datcher family rights to the property previously worked by their enslaved ancestors onto fabric in distinctive white and blue hues. Viewers gain an understanding of what it was like after 1865, when people gained their freedom, but few resources in which to build their lives.

“We want people to reexamine how they think about history,” Gaddis continued. “We hope they’ll go back to their own family history, look at the things they’ve inherited, that have been passed down and think about how they tell stories about the past.”

The exhibition will run until late fall and has already been recognized nationally. “Out of Whole Cloth” was featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered” podcast and in the platform’s “The Picture Show” coverage.

Additionally, CNN’s segment “First of All with Victor Blackwell” spoke with the co-founders of the Wallace Center: Theoangelo Perkins, the current mayor of Harpersville, is a descendant of the McGinnis family, while Nell Wallace Harrell Gottlieb inherited the Wallace House from her grandmother. Together, the founders work to reimagine the plantation as a place for healing and art.

The exhibition is part of Gaddis and Finkel’s ongoing research about the rural Black experience in Shelby County. In addition to co-teaching an honors class that integrates public history with visual communications, the two are also working to redesign Peter Datcher’s community history archive using funds from a CADC Seed grant.

“All these efforts, we hope, will lead to a cross-discipline initiative that focuses on community history projects that experience design-related outputs,” Finkel said.