Dawoud Bey’s Evergreen depicts haunting images captured at the Evergreen Plantation of Wallace, Louisiana. Installed across three video channels, the work scans the grounds of the most intact plantation complex still standing in the United States. The work captures swaths of trees and the remnants of living quarters of the historically enslaved Black people. An ominous soundtrack provided by American vocalist and composer Imani Uzuri narrates:
“Come by here.”
“She got a right to the tree of her life.”
“Someone’s praying.”
“Just like a dream.”
Bey reflects upon his time visiting Evergreen Plantation, which was halted due to the Covid-19 pandemic: “Returning to Louisiana recently only reinforced my belief that we forget history. . . and that calling it to remembrance — as I do in my work — keeps us alert and responsive to the presence of those horrific pieces of a past, which, left untended, can return to haunt us yet again.” Void of human subjects, Evergreen is a multisensory meditation on historical traumas.
Dawoud Bey (b. 1953), Evergreen, 2021, 3-channel video with sound, duration: 10 minutes, 59 seconds. Art Bridges. © Dawoud Bey, Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York.
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