Tyiesha Radford Shorts by Ryan Jones of Ryan Jones Photography
Tyiesha Radford Shorts has begun to prepare for her future artist-in-residency stint at Urban Arts Space by looking to the past.
An educator, writer and multidisciplinary artist, Shorts has in recent months focused her attentions on Black Ohio history, and more specifically the years that stretched between the state’s 1803 founding and the Reconstruction era that followed in the wake of the Civil War. “I was really thinking of my own experience having grown up in Ohio and not having known much of the history that I now know, such as the Black state representatives and the work they did to undo the Black Codes,” said Shorts, referencing the laws enacted in Southern states in the aftermath of the Civil War and meant to restrict the movements of formerly enslaved people. “And then I’m looking at Black settlement, considering the history of the Ohio River as the site of liberation even before Juneteenth. And I was just thinking, like, why isn’t anyone showing and teaching this history? Why isn’t it common knowledge? And so, I really wanted this residency to be an opportunity … for me to unearth that for folks. It’s kind of an excavation of that history that isn’t always available.”
It also arrives at a point in time when some of this history is being willfully obscured by the Trump administration, which received widespread criticism when it removed pages from military websites that highlighted the accomplishments of Black veterans and the Navajo Code Talkers, among others, these erasures occurring as officials advance segregationist policies under the guise of rolling back corporate DEI practices. But while Shorts acknowledged the chaos being purposely sewn by the administration, particularly within the museum and library sectors essential to her research, she said her interest in the work long predated this current moment, which has further crystallized for her the cyclical nature of these kinds of attacks.
“These moments have repeated in Black history, and we can look at those times when certain presses were started, or when certain people decided to write memoirs or have a memoir written on their behalf. … And it’s almost like, okay, here we are again,” said Shorts, who also serves as education coordinator for Maroon Arts Group. “There has always been an awareness these histories would be erased, or there would be certain efforts toward erasure. And seeing how Black folk have systematically attempted to salvage or save our own histories because of this acute awareness that someone is going to try to erase me, it kind of makes me feel like part of a legacy. And it makes me feel like I am doing the work that the predecessors laid out for me.”
In her research, Shorts relies on everything from library and museum archives to oral histories and traditions, pointing to the ways formerly enslaved people protected parts of their stories by preserving them in songs or folk tales. Shorts is also an advocate of a concept preached by Toni Morrison and known as literary archeology, a method of inquiry in which artists reconstruct this missing history by excavating and interpreting available evidence. “It’s this artistic idea that we keep the archive, we look through the archive, and where information can no longer be found, and where memory no longer exists, then we as artists fill in the gaps,” Shorts said.
Shorts traced her deep interest in history back through her father, an Appalachian born in West Virginia who made sure his children grew up with an awareness of these roots, be it the names of distant relatives, the towns in which they once dwelled, or the associated historic markers that intersected with these various people and places. These early lessons have been further buttressed by the mentorship of Paul Jawanza Cook, a professor of history at Columbus State Community College. Shorts, who also teaches courses in African American history at the college, said Cook was the first person to instruct her on what this type of scholarship could look like outside of academia, and which involves drawing upon the knowledge of elders who populate community spaces.
“There’s been this whole prioritization with what’s been recorded, either in written form or in audio recordings, and it diminishes or removes credibility from oral traditions, which is how a lot of histories are preserved, particularly in minority communities where folks don’t have access to publishing or certain kinds of [recording] technologies,” Shorts said. “These are things that are passed down traditionally, whether they’ve learned a song, or a particular way of cooking. … And you might not even know what they’re connected to, but it could be the only remnant you have of certain histories. And they have persisted in large part because of the way they’re transmitted. … I’ve heard of family reunions that take place in Virginia or California, where the way people say grace over food is done differently. And that, in and of itself, has a long history and tradition that a textbook or article won’t necessarily convey.”
For Shorts, much of the research she has conducted outside of academic spaces has coincided with her work with Maroon Arts Group, and in particular her role helming an ongoing series of community learning groups – free courses that run between 10 and 16 weeks, each focused on a particular historical subject. One course, for instance, consisted of a deep dive into the maroon settlements created by formerly enslaved people, which were often insulated in remote areas far removed from the influence of colonial authorities. Another course delved into the writings of James Baldwin. And the most recent course explored Ohio’s early Black history, a subject that will serve as the backbone of Shorts’ UAS residency, which begins on June 1 and runs through February, highlighted by an associated exhibition planned for the downtown gallery in September.
These Ohio-connected histories could take countless forms in the exhibition, surfacing in poems and essays, photographs, and layered installations, with the subject matter dictating the means of visual expression. This story of a family recipe passed down over decades, for example, might find its clearest form in a poem, while one account of Black Ohioans kidnapped from the state and returned to slavery in the South has formed the basis for an in-progress documentary being created in collaboration with filmmaker Matthew Pitts, and which Shorts hopes to debut sometime prior to the February end of her residency.
In considering the story of the kidnapped people, Shorts said she weighed a number of approaches, from staging a series of photographs to building a walkway or a path that visitors to the gallery might follow. Current events, however, led her to the documentary concept, with Shorts drawing a connection between this historic kidnapping and the actions being taken in this moment by agents with ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement), who routinely sweep up people it claims are in the country illegally, secreting them away to foreign prisons absent due process.
“And it’s another reminder that we’ve been here before,” Shorts said. “The same kind of greed we’re experiencing from corporations and conglomerates, the same kind of ignoring, the same kinds of dislocation. These are places we have gotten to before as a society when we got too comfortable, and where we allowed for certain things to happen without putting our foot down. It’s a reminder that if we don’t act, these things will continue. These aren’t new things. So, yes, [the exhibition] will be a contemporary reflection as much as it is one from the past.”