The Record Remains
October 23 – December 31
State of Tennessee Gallery
Included with Admission
What Remains After Violence?
The answer is rarely found in a single source.
The Record Remains explores histories of racial violence against Black communities in America through contemporary art, firsthand accounts, and historical records. Together, these sources reveal not only what was lost, but what survived.
At the center of the exhibition are works from the Museum’s Untold Stories Collection, placed in conversation with the records that remain: testimony, photographs, newspapers, government documents, oral histories, family memory, and place itself. The Record Remains asks visitors to consider how these histories survived, how they have been carried forward, and what it means that we can still encounter them today.
Racial violence creates rupture, but it does not guarantee erasure. The record remains because someone kept making one: the survivors, witnesses, journalists, families, artists, and activists who preserved histories that official accounts often ignored, distorted, or attempted to suppress.
Histories Explored
The exhibition examines selected histories of racial violence and forced displacement, including:
Ebenezer Creek
The Memphis Massacre of 1866
The People’s Grocery lynching and Ida B. Wells’s anti-lynching work
Thibodaux, Louisiana
East St. Louis, Missouri (1917)
The lynching of Ell Persons
Corbin, Kentucky
Elaine, Arkansas (1919)
Tulsa, Oklahoma (1921)
Each section explores the:
STORY — What happened, and whose experience helps us understand it?
RECORD — What evidence survived, who preserved it, and what does it reveal or leave unresolved?
LEGACY — How was the history remembered, recovered, challenged, or carried forward?
The emphasis is not only on the violence itself, but on the people who refused to let it disappear from the historical record.
Ephraim Urevbu
Freedom Summer 1964
Acrylic and mixed media on board
Ephraim Urevbu
Selma Bloody Sunday 1965
Acrylic and mixed media on board