#Harrison Kinnane Smith

[hydeordie]

Harrison Kinnane Smith Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company Final Dividend Check (1883), 2024 Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company final dividend check, rent-to-own contract, stewardship agreement.

Harrison Kinnane Smith’s collaborative work and site-specific interventions critique public institutions and financial systems. His practice departs from the intersection of critical geography and political economy. Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company Final Dividend Check (1883) (2024) constitutes the latest addition to Smith’s growing body of work exploring racial ideology in the history of American real estate law and finance. The artwork draws on the exploitative arrangements of two failed Reconstruction-era reparation programs in order to support a non-profit organization providing affordable housing at the site of these historical failures. Freedman’s Savings offers collectors the opportunity to purchase one of the last checks issued by the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company, a bank chartered by the Lincoln Administration to serve freedpeople who were legally excluded by “White” banks. Depositors in the Freedman’s Bank who hoped to save towards land ownership instead found their savings nearly halved when corruption and mismanagement led the bank to close after less than a decade. The check — a final payment of $1.50 issued to a Savannah accountholder — is available to prospective buyers only through a lease-to-own agreement that replicates the land contracts issued under the 1865 “Forty Acres and a Mule” order. Just as emancipated Black Americans lost their land when the “Forty Acres” order was canceled, title to the check is promptly withdrawn and prospective buyers are left only with the contract carefully crafted to exclude them from full ownership. All proceeds generated by serial leasing of this work directly support the Savannah Community Land Trust.

[kolajmag]

COLLAGE ON VIEW

making home here

At The Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA through 10 April 2022. “making home here” is an exhibition featuring five Pittsburgh-based artists who explore concepts of home as a site of both belonging and dislocation. The title of the exhibition is drawn from a passage in bell hooks’ Appalachian Elegy (2012), a poetry collection in which the author reflects on her experience as a Black woman finding home in the backwoods of Kentucky. In “making home here”, Gavin Andrew Benjamin, Naomi Chambers, Justin Emmanuel Dumas, Njaimeh Njie and Harrison Kinnane Smith explore liminality, placemaking, familial bonds and systemic racism’s impact on the housing market. MORE

*****************************

Kolaj Magazine, a full color, print magazine, exists to show how the world of collage is rich, layered, and thick with complexity. By remixing history and culture, collage artists forge new thinking. To understand collage is to reshape one's thinking of art history and redefine the canon of visual culture that informs the present.

SUBSCRIBE | CURRENT ISSUE | GET A COPY

SIGN UP TO GET EMAILS