Curator Rikki Byrd thought of the concept for the “Mark Me, Too” exhibit at Chicago’s Hyde Park Art Center about four years ago. The works by five Black women and nonbinary artists explore themes of motherhood, diaspora, and legacies of trauma and strength. But the show is especially relevant as a racist and sexist regime attempts to defund the arts and silence the voices of immigrants and others who are seen as marked and marginalized. 

The title of the exhibit, which launched Aug. 9 and runs until Dec. 14, comes from Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” which Byrd told Prism she has read and reread multiple times. In one passage, the novel’s protagonist Sethe relates how her enslaved mother, whom she barely knew, told her daughter she could recognize her by a brand: “a circle and a cross burnt right into her skin.” Sethe is frightened and confused, but she also wants to be like her mother, and she wants her mother to be able to find her. “But how will you know me? How will you know me? Mark me, too,” she says. “Mark the mark on me too.” 

“I was interested in the ways that that mark becomes both this heavy moment of reflecting on slavery and also this moment that Sethe as a child is trying to find some type of connection,” Byrd said. 

In curating the show, she said, she selected artists, “who I thought were really thinking about the complexity of these marks that they carry through in their own heritages, in their own legacies that are heavy marks to carry, and yet they reappear and appear again across their practices.”

The first work viewers encounter in the gallery is a striking examination of the precarity of a marked heritage, or a heritage of marks. Ciarra K. Walters created a series of “Fragility Suits,” garments made out of nylon stockings with eggshells attached to them. In a video, “Eileen’s Daughters” (2024), Walters and her three sisters wear the suits while hugging and embracing each other. The images are kind of gross, kind of silly, and kind of designed to make you wince as you watch the eggshells crack and flake. Eggs are symbols of birth and rebirth, so the piece suggests both fracturing and renewal, as family, love, and legacy come out of holding onto bits of brokenness. 

Lisa DeAbreu and Natasha Moustache also explore relationships with mothers and heritage. DeAbrue’s “Come (Let Me Comb Your Hair)” is a painting on a tablecloth passed down by her Caribbean mother. The image shows a woman combing a smiling girl’s hair in a room illuminated by bright sunshine from the window; the doily pattern of the tablecloth is visible in patches, breaking through the image. Memory is layered on memory, and memory disrupts or breaks through memory in a process that, like combing hair, is both painful and intimate.

Moustache’s series of photographs mostly chronicles people and scenery in the Seychelles, where their mother is from. One exception is a piece titled “In the Wake (American Dream),” which was taken in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic lockdown. The title is a reference to Cristina Sharpe’s book “In the Wake,” which uses the wake of a ship as a metaphor for life in the Black diaspora in the aftermath of slavery and colonialism. The image shows Moustache’s mother submerged to her shoulders in the swimming pool of her California home; she looks a little skeptical and a little tired. 

Moustache told Prism that their mother always dreamed of having a pool in her backyard. In this image, their mother is seen using that pool and relaxing, something Moustache said they rarely saw her do.

“I’m thinking about the idea of colonialism, capitalism—how you need to push, to push, to push, to be better, to do better,” Moustache said. “And this was one quiet moment where she’s actually enjoying this thing that she’s worked her entire life for, right? But I think about how it’s really difficult for her to think outside of those constructs, because they’re so ingrained.”

The works of Lex Marie and Lola Ayisha Ogbara don’t depict their own mothers directly, instead examining motherhood in more generalized terms. Marie’s “Deconstructed Black Maternal Flag” is an American flag created of deconstructed flags and hospital receiving blankets connected together with rope. The piece uneasily imagines a symbol of the nation as swaddling Black children with affection—a utopian call for an America that actually cares for Black babies, and a critique of the actual America, which does not.

Ogbara’s most striking piece in the exhibition is “Bubblegum, Bubblegum,” a 3-foot-high pink, vaguely human-like, abstract figure with exuberant pink ropes draped around it.

“It’s childlike,” Ogbara told Prism. “It looks like chewed-up bubblegum. It sits on a piece of concrete, which is my idea of kind of bringing the street into the gallery, the sidewalk to the gallery. So it’s a piece of bubblegum on a sidewalk. It’s providing a safe place to land for this child, providing energy to be free and be who they are.”

Bubblegum is easy to leave a mark in, so the piece embodies vulnerability as well as joy. It captures the way that childhood is exciting because children are ready to be shaped, which is also what makes childhood potentially dangerous and traumatic.

Artists make a mark, and the artists in “Mark Me, Too” are marking the world—through paint, sculpture, photography, and eggshells—as well as thinking about how they carry marks. The U.S. has often tried to simultaneously stigmatize Black people and erase the evidence of that stigma. Sethe’s mother in “Beloved” is responding to those efforts to mark her and erase her by taking her own painful brand and using it as a way to preserve and protect her memory and her family. In “Mark Me, Too,” the five artists are finding meaning in their mothers’ marks as well. 

Editorial Team:
Sahar Fatima, Lead Editor
Carolyn Copeland, Top Editor
Stephanie Harris, Copy Editor