Crystal Z Campbell's 'Lines of Sight' honors Tulsa and tenacity at MAG 

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America’s recent efforts to grapple with its racial history and enduring turmoil has erupted with a vigor that hasn’t been seen since the Civil Rights era. Issues of inequity are on the table for discussion, and so are some under-acknowledged violent events that hampered Black Americans’ struggle to achieve equity.

One of those moments, The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, is the starting point for a new work by multidisciplinary artist Crystal Z Campbell on display at the Memorial Art Gallery’s Media Arts Watch Gallery.

“Crystal Z Campbell: Lines of Sight” considers the massacre, in which mobs of white people killed hundreds of residents and annihilated 35 city blocks of Greenwood, a predominantly Black suburb of Tulsa, known as Black Wall Street due to its prosperity.

“Lines of Sight,” like other works by Campbell, centers on what the exhibition text calls “public secrets,” or stories that are known by many but rarely discussed. Campbell’s installation goes further than discussing the massacre and makes use of rarely seen and heard archival materials to explore Black communities that survived attempts to shut them down.

For example, the film “Flight” runs on several screens and on the walls of a dark room. The movie features footage of successful Black communities in the mid-1920s collected by Black amateur filmmaker Solomon Sir Jones. Sheer fabric panels suspended from the ceiling form fragile veils that adulterate the view.
Layers of audio — including The Gap Band’s “You Dropped a Bomb on Me'' and testimony of Greenwood survivors — reverberate throughout the room. Among them is the voice of a 106-year-old woman who recalled living in Greenwood as a 6-year-old at the time of the massacre.

“I was blessed to live with my grandmother in the beautiful Black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma, called Greenwood,” she said. “I was lucky. I had a home and I had toys, and I felt very safe. Then everything changed. It was like a war.”

Three collages from Campbell’s series “Notes from Black Wall Street,” displayed just outside of the Media Arts Watch Gallery, are made from archival photos from the rebuilding of Greenwood that Campbell has marked with paint, both decorating and scarring the images.

The show’s curator, Almudena Escobar López, called the installation “a radical way of telling from the inside of documents that emerges in the form of emotional and physical responses.”

“Lines of Sight” runs through Jan. 7, 2024.

Rebecca Rafferty is CITY's life editor. She can be reached at [email protected].