East Village in New York-based artist, Whitfield Lovell, does mix-media installations that center on memory and history and evoke a harrowing tale of post-Reconstruction America. Inspired by the forced removal of a thriving African American community in 1921 because of fears about its proximity to a women's college in Denton, Texas, Lovell, in 2000 in an exhibition titled "Whispers From the Walls", built at The Studio Museum in Harlem an intimate environment with layered voices, artifacts, portraits, and sounds.

In this exhibition, Lovell created a sturdy one-room cabin constructed of cast-off wooden supports with various accoutrements that suggest limited means and modest hopes of the community's inhabitants - an old victrola...