Free Hill: Renewal and Rememory

About the artist: Xandr Brown is currently a multimedia producer with the Center for Rural Strategies. In 2018, she graduated from the University of Rochester in upstate New York with a BA in History and Communications with a minor in Environmental Humanities. Before reporting for the Daily Yonder she previously reported with hyperlocal newsrooms in Flint, Michigan. While trained as a journalist, she aspires to continue to do community engaged, multimedia exhibits based in the intersection of oral history, ethnography, and documentary.

Artist statement: 

“…the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.”
—W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk 

I use multimedia presentations as a way to create a chamber of memory that can be visited  and revisited. They serve to encapsulate local, witnessed events that are excluded by formal accounts of history. Though Free Hill has no single theory of origin, the fact that it is gone is fixed in the hearts of the few remaining people that grew up there.

My work is community-informed, relying on their individual recollections and experiences of a place that no longer exists.

The reality of Free Hill is a story of what it means to have, but never own, to own but never keep. Here, I explore the relationship between place, personal memory, and identity as a way to challenge collective assumptions about democracy, freedom, and equality.

In places like Free Hill, it was not enough to live in a self-contained and sustained community where basic needs were met, because it was not considered equal to what lay outside of it. Urban renewal was a structural antidote for communities across the country that championed clearing out inequality by removing blight. Families that lived in the Free Hill area were displaced after phases of urban renewal, spearheaded by the City of Athens, which demolished their homes in the 60’s and 70’s to the benefit of Tennessee Wesleyan University. For the subjects of this exhibition, they recall moving away or spending the rest of their childhood growing up in the projects called Hillcrest apartments. This occurred against the backdrop of what some consider the peak of reaped benefits from the Civil Rights Movement, where integration and equality were the political hopes of the day.Through portraiture, video, and oral accounts, my work illustrates the way historical phenomena don’t happen beyond us; rather they occur in the things we heard, what we felt, what we didn’t understand, and what we try so desperately to never forget.