Silenced No Longer Project
Artist Statement
February 2023

“When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have to speak up. You have to say something; you have to do something.” John Lewis

I have worked with warm glass and glass beads for years as my art medium. Recent events – the death of George Floyd, the Central Park racism moment caught on tape, and the call to “say their names”, have highlighted the plight of those who have suffered racial profiling or who have lost their lives at the hands of a broken and shattered criminal justice system. In response, I decided to bead a piece as a memorial to honor those killed by police – a tribute to the Black Lives Matter movement, and an acknowledgement of my white privilege.

George Floyd’s death moved me to support the demonstrations, through my art, by expressing my thoughts around systemic racism and the racial injustices that are rampant in our society. I believe that without the demonstrations, all of the work that had been done to advance racial equality, including the marches during the 60s civil rights movement, would be lost. The fight needs to continue now, more than ever. From the way we police, to the laws that guide our courts, the entire criminal justice system including the penal system and for-profit incarceration, all must be overhauled. We need to dismantle the whole system as it currently exists and promote racial equity.

At the encouragement of my son, a computer programmer, I began exploring and creating a relationship between beads and code. I developed a system for using Hex code1 to record the names and demographics (age, gender, date of fatal encounter, and place of death) of those who were killed at the hands of the police.

Little did I know that the list of names I already had was simply a drop of water in the ocean of names. It was sobering to learn that the list of names I knew about was a very short list – Treyvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, Ed Gardner along with those I knew of as a little girl during the 60’s civil rights movement.

My online research took me to a website that is a searchable and sortable database of fatal encounters with police in the US dating back to 2000. I started with the year 2020 and organized the names chronologically by date. Each row of beading represents one person.

When I started the project, I did not realize how hard the weight of this would be. The week I beaded Breonna Taylor’s name, I felt completely gutted as I came to realize I had spent two months working on this project before even getting to her name. There were more than 100 names of Black people killed in this country before her and she was killed on March 13, 2020; just a few short months into 2020.

The panels measure 4 inches wide. There is a panel beaded for each year. The total length of the currently completed 21 (2000-2020) panels is 789 inches (just over 65 feet) and includes over 8600 names.

I do this heart wrenching work because I believe I can show and honor, through my beadwork, the stark and startling numbers of Black lives lost at the hands of law enforcement officers. This piece, through its shear length, provides a thought-provoking visualization of the staggering and senseless loss of life. It is my fervent desire that people see the work and be shocked and terrified. I hope the Silenced No Longer Project provides a desire in viewers to have difficult conversations, to acknowledge the pain and loss and to work toward change.

1 - Hex code, short for Hexadecimal code, is a base 16 numbering system used by computer programmers as a sort of shorthand from binary code. In Hex Code the 16 units of the code represented with the numbers 0-9 and the letters a-f (translating to 10-16) are paired to represent characters. I have assigned bead colors to numbers 0-9 and a-f. I used online charts and converters to translate the characters to the bead work. A bead legend is stitched into each panel allowing the interested user the ability to decode the work.