Dail Chambers + General Sisters, "There once was a billboard here"
Date: Saturday, June 10, 2023
Time: 3-5PM
Location: Begins on the Corner of Cass Avenue + Jefferson Avenue
Details:
A walking tour of remembering and calling in the collective, guided by Dail Chambers.
Please join us for a guided public gathering of collective remembering at the site of a former billboard which claimed "The Most Dangerous Place for a Black Child is in a Womb." Dail and her friends repeatedly wheatpasted over it, took it down, and the Catholic Workers Movement billboard continued to be replaced over and over again. Here, we are surrounded by the memories of the Pruitt-Igoe housing, as well as a new health center named for the Homer G. Phillips Hospital, the only public hospital to treat Black residents during segregation. Ailanthus trees, yellow dock, thistle and dandelions are growing here.
In Movement Transmissions, General Sisters collaborators Ginger Brooks Takahashi and Dana Bishop-Root invite visitors to explore open pathways constructed of words that suggest, but do not designate, routes. These pathways were designated in collaboration with four artists active in St. Louis’s justice movements—Dail Chambers, Dustin Gibson, Basmin Nadra, and Xochi Plancarte—and repopulate public spaces along Jefferson Avenue with memories of people, buildings, and actions that are no longer present. General Sisters also considers the plants that occupy those places: plants that also have stories to tell. Together, plants and people highlighted in Movement Transmissions co-narrate histories of displacement, carcerality, and environmental racism as well as joys found in communities and solidarity-building.
Dail Chambers’ walking tour is the second of three Movement Transmissions, formed in collaboration with General Sisters.
