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WHAT REMAINS?
THE LEGACY PROJECT
An artistic investigation into memory, place, and the preservation of historic Black communities.
What happens to the memory of a place when the people who created it begin to disappear?
FOUR HISTORIC LOCATIONS... FOUR STORIES AT RISK
The first Legacy Project investigation focuses on four historically Black communities whose stories illuminate different expressions of freedom, self-determination, enterprise, culture, and belonging in America. Each community remains a living place, but each is confronting forces that can alter how its history is experienced, remembered, and carried forward.
Population loss. Environmental vulnerability. Development. Changing tourism economies. Migration. The disappearance of historic structures and the passing of generations who hold firsthand community memory.
The urgency is not simply to document what these places were. It is to explore how their histories can remain physically and culturally present in what they become.
WHEN HISTORY ENTERS THE STUDIO
The Legacy Project begins not with a monument, but with an investigation.
Drawing from archival research, historic landscapes, architecture, oral histories and community memory, David Wilson will develop a new body of artwork, examining how the history of a place can be translated into physical form.
These works will exist between intimate studio installations and monumental public art: substantial enough to command space, yet human enough in scale to invite close examination. Each will stand as an independent work while contributing to a larger exploration of memory, permanence and place.
CAN MATERIAL HOLD MEMORY
History is often preserved through photographs, documents, and written records.
The Legacy Project asks what happens when those histories are translated into material and form. Through an intentional exploration of fragility and permanence, transparency and obscurity, reflection and distortion, light and absence, David Wilson will investigate how physical material can carry the complexities of memory itself.
Rather than illustrating history, the work seeks to interpret it, examining how stories can be preserved, fractured, transformed, or made newly visible through the passage of time. In doing so, material becomes more than a medium. It becomes a language for considering what survives, what disappears, and what we choose to carry forward.
MOUND BAYOU, MISSISSIPPI
BUILD
What does it mean to build freedom?
Founded in 1887 by formerly enslaved men led by Isaiah T. Montgomery and Benjamin T. Green, Mound Bayou became one of the most extraordinary experiments in Black self-determination in the post-emancipation South.
It developed as a community of Black landowners with businesses, schools, churches, a bank, healthcare institutions and more than forty retail establishments during its strongest period.
But the community that once demonstrated what Black economic independence could look like in the Mississippi Delta has contracted substantially. Mound Bayou's population declined from 2,102 in 2000 to 1,534 in 2020, a decrease of roughly 27 percent.
WHAT IS AT RISK
Not simply buildings or population numbers, but the visibility of an extraordinary American experiment in Black land ownership, self-government, institution building and economic independence.
WHAT LEGACY CAN DO
Create contemporary artistic entry points into that history while exploring how cultural memory, public art, interpretation and eventually place-making could help position Mound Bayou's history as an asset for future generations.
PRINCEVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA
ENDURE
What does it mean to remain?
Princeville's story began in 1865 when formerly enslaved people gathered near a Union encampment along the Tar River and established a settlement they called Freedom Hill. Incorporated as Princeville in 1885 and named for carpenter Turner Prince, the community became an extraordinary expression of Black self-determination in the aftermath of slavery.
But the same landscape upon which Freedom Hill was established has repeatedly threatened the physical community. Princeville sits in the Tar River floodplain and has endured numerous floods. Hurricane Floyd devastated the town in 1999, with water reaching as much as 23 feet above some streets. Hurricane Matthew brought catastrophic flooding again in 2016, leaving roughly 80 percent of the town underwater.
NATURAL ERASURE
History can disappear without anyone deciding to destroy it.
Flood.
Storm.
Decay.
Repeated rebuilding.
Relocation.
Eventually the physical evidence of a community can become separated from the people whose ancestors established it.
WHAT IS AT RISK
The relationship between history and the physical landscape where that history occurred.
WHAT LEGACY CAN DO
Explore how art can carry place-memory even when the landscape itself is vulnerable, creating cultural anchors capable of connecting future generations to Freedom Hill regardless of how Princeville must adapt to environmental change.
EATONVILLE, FLORIDA
PRESERVE
Who controls the story of a place as that place changes?
Eatonville emerged from the post-emancipation era as a self-governing Black community and incorporated in 1887. Its significance encompasses Black municipal independence, education, culture, community development and the extraordinary literary legacy of Zora Neale Hurston. Its historic district is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and Eatonville remains actively engaged in historic preservation through its local historic commission and preservation programs.
Unlike Princeville, the primary Legacy question here isn't natural disaster.
It's continuity through change.
Eatonville's physical character has already changed considerably over generations. National Register documentation describes how postwar subdivision and population growth transformed what had once been a distinctly rural Black town into a more conventional small Southern community.
WHAT IS AT RISK
The danger is not necessarily that Eatonville disappears from the map.
It's that the physical and demographic evolution of the surrounding region can gradually make the historic Eatonville harder to see.
WHAT LEGACY CAN DO
Use contemporary art to help establish cultural continuity, connecting present-day Eatonville to the people, stories, traditions and institutions that established its significance.
ATLANTIC BEACH, SOUTH CAROLINA
BELONG
Who belongs to a place when the world around it changes?
Known as the Black Pearl, Atlantic Beach developed into a thriving African American coastal destination during segregation. Black entrepreneurs established hotels, restaurants, nightclubs and shops, creating a place where African American families could experience coastal leisure at a time when many beaches excluded them. The town remains an independent municipality within the much larger Grand Strand tourism region.
Its demographic transformation is dramatic.
Atlantic Beach had 351 residents in 2000, 334 in 2010 and only 195 in 2020. Its non-Hispanic Black population fell from 288 in 2000 to just 88 in 2020.
Meanwhile, the surrounding Grand Strand remains a major tourism landscape.
That creates a very different Legacy question.
What happens when the destination survives, but the community that gave it cultural meaning becomes smaller?
WHAT IS AT RISK
Not simply population.
Cultural ownership of the story.
WHAT LEGACY CAN DO
Create a permanent artistic record of Black leisure, entrepreneurship, Gullah-rooted culture and belonging that remains embedded within Atlantic Beach regardless of how the surrounding tourism economy and physical landscape continue to change.
THE COST OF WAITING
WITHOUT INTERVENTION
Population continues to decline.
Firsthand memories disappear.
Historic buildings are lost.
Land changes ownership.
Environmental events alter landscapes.
Development changes the physical character of communities.
Visitors encounter markers without understanding the people behind them.
Eventually, history becomes something reconstructed entirely through archives.
WITH INTENTIONAL PRESERVATION
Community memory is documented while knowledge holders remain.
Contemporary artists interpret history for new audiences.
Museums and archives gain new cultural assets.
Public art creates visible markers of identity.
Technology connects physical place with deeper historical content.
Tourism can become a mechanism for education and economic opportunity.
Future development encounters a community whose history has already been made visible.
BEYOND THE OBJECT
A Second Layer of Memory
The Legacy Project also explores how contemporary technology can extend an artwork beyond its physical boundaries.
Where appropriate, augmented reality and digital interpretation could allow viewers to encounter an additional layer of place-based history through the artwork itself.
A visitor would not simply stand before an object and read a plaque.
Through a mobile device, the physical work could become a portal into archival photographs, historic maps, recorded oral histories, documentary footage, reconstructed environments, community voices, or imagery connected directly to the place being commemorated.
The artwork remains complete without technology. The digital layer expands what the physical object can hold.