Ep 3: Stephen Towns: Uncovering the Invisible

Sometimes the most radical act is remembering what we've been told to forget.

Stephen Towns is a Baltimore artist whose quilts and paintings recover the stories that American history tried to erase. From Nat Turner's rebellion to the forgotten Black leisure spaces of the Jim Crow era, Stephen's work is an act of recovery, stitching together fragments of history that keep surfacing.

"Current circumstances that are going on in this country make it very difficult for artists like me to express ourselves. I'm attacked by my being, being a Black, gay man. I'm attacked by being an artist who makes work about Black American history."

Stephen Towns

In 2018, Stephen became the first African American artist in residence at Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. Think about that for a moment. 2018. The first. He created a monumental portrait of Elsie Henderson, the Black woman who ran that famous house for decades yet whose story had barely been told.

Every image of Elsie showed her elderly, holding a cake. Stephen found photos of her young and vibrant, and painted her reclining in a bathing suit. He wanted to un-mamify her, to restore her dignity.

"He really created this other image of Elsie that kind of pushed back on this kind of ageist sensibility... He wanted to un-mamify Elsie Henderson and once again put this dignity back into her."

Kilolo Luckett, Alma Lewis Museum

We also hear from Kilolo Luckett, Stephen's longtime curator at the Alma Lewis Museum, on what it means to support Black artists in the current political climate.

"I am worthy of this work. We have never been a trend. Certain people like to put us in a box, but I am worthy of this work and supporting and advocating and providing the scaffolding to support visual artists, literary artists, and cultural workers. So I'm unafraid and I want to live in an unencumbered way."

Kilolo Luckett, Alma Lewis Museum

The most radical act is remembering what we've been told to forget.