Now part of a new installation in Gallery Route One’s Project Space, “Perspectives: Past, Present, Future,” was an outdoor installation created in 2020 by Naima S. Dean, Zoe Fry, Winona Nadine Lewis and Sharon Virtue, artists in the Introverts Collective.
The four women designed Perspectives as an interactive community art project to highlight history, personal stories, and portraiture and invited passers-by to respond creatively. Three free-standing doors were installed in the Depot Plaza of Mill Valley. The doors served as a metaphor to view systematic racism through three perspectives: past, present, and future. Each door had a simple sketch on the front, to be painted in by the community on Labor Day weekend, 2020. The back side of each door posed a question and community members were invited to write their answers. The installation stood in the Depot Plaza for four months, creating the presence of Black portraiture in a predominantly white community space, and generating powerful and productive conversations.
The installation at Gallery Route One includes the three original doors new doors for public participation plus photographs and a powerful video telling the story of the project’s inception and creation, focusing on personal narratives of exclusion vs. belonging by the four artists from the Introverts Collective, three biracial and one white.
