"I am compelled to make collages and risograph prints about Eve and to tell of her through materials, because of this sense of lack, of having to collect scattered pieces..."

Alley Pezanoski-Browne makes art in multiple mediums inspired by dream logic and spiritual & ancestral knowledge. She cares deeply about building creative practices that better people’s lives, catalyze collective power, and celebrate radical care, especially for historically excluded communities. Her essays have been published in the Leonardo Music Journal and Bitch. She has held leadership positions with the Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC) (where she is now a Board Member) and Open Signal PDX. She received her master’s in Critical Theory & Creative Research from Pacific Northwest College of Art and had a stopover in Hong Kong as a Fulbright Scholar.

caught

Artist Reflection

Eve was a Black American who lived in the United States before it was a country. We know about her today only because of her proximity to white people deemed important by historians. From them we know she belonged to Peyton Randolph, called a father of America, someone who said that “no one man should have so much power” when he abdicated the presidency to George Washington. His wife ultimately sold Eve in a document signed by James Madison, the last evidence of Eve in the white historical record.

Eve has lingered with me along with the few details I know about her: The fact that she was educated to be Randolph’s wife’s companion. That she and her son ran away during the Revolutionary War, but were later captured. It struck me that the things we know about her life are only scraps of information. We know nothing about what she thought or felt. But nonetheless she exists to this day as a ghost in the text to complicate the official narrative and to stir up questions about how much else is missing from the record.

I am compelled to make collages and risograph prints about Eve and to tell of her through materials, because of this sense of lack, of having to collect scattered pieces. Re-enactments, illustrations, replicas, approximations. While knowing little about her, she is important to me. The piece in this collection is an experiment to find her in multiple mediums, because words mostly fail to.