PUBLIC INSTALLATIONS
Tim Seibles’ poems are features of public installations on social justice and memory in Virginia and Texas. His work is commissioned widely to respond to events, social activist movements, and press publications, including The New York Times 1619 Project. As an artist, Tim’s foundational commitment is the creation of poetry as an accessible expression to consider multiple ways for a collective reimagination of the existing social, political, and economic conditions, and the resulting disparities that sharply divide societies around the world.
From ReSite: https://www.resite-studio.com/victimsofracialviolence
Shadow Lines, Memorial For The Victims Of Racial Violence
Completion: 2024
Location: City of Dallas, TX
Description: Shadow Lines interlaces the elements of shadow, light, time, and memory. The design features a semicircular wall of weathering steel on a circular concrete plaza, creating a serene place for personal reflection, intergenerational conversation, and public commemoration. We took our primary inspiration from the words of Dr. George Keaton’s that that this memorial “will be a reverent reminder that lynchings happened on the ground we walk on every day.”
The memorial evokes a sundial, but instead of marking hours of the day, it marks the dates and names of each victim of racially motivated lynchings and hangings from the time of slavery to the Jim Crow era in Dallas. Where the longest shadow of each of these dates falls on the memorial wall is where the names are located, as if the shadow itself cut into the steel, indelibly etching the memory of each victim forever in the heart of the city. This becomes a powerful visual metaphor for the continuity of lives cut short by racial violence.
The wall features the poem, Here, by renowned poet Tim Seibles on the transformation of Dallas’ collective memory in the context of this difficult chapter in the city’s history and the ongoing racial violence of today. The poem interweaves a sense of renewal, resiliency, and optimism for current and future generations.
Poet: Tim Seibles
Design Optimization/Management: METALAB
Photography: Raul Rodriguez
HERE
These are the things
nightmares are made of:
ropes, knives, a torn
black face, burning flesh,
white mobs, their picnics,
the blood-spattered hands.
We want to forget
what happened here,
but it is impossible
not to wonder what broken
song in the human heart
led to this. What rancid fear
tightened the knots, gathered
the grinning throngs?
All of us live these echoes:
the last screams of a man
ripped apart, hung for display,
the mob’s ruthless laughter.
Though we remain
tied to these wounds
and wary of each other—
though we don’t want
to believe this happened here,
this grief, this jagged silence
still builds inside us, no matter
how far we run, no matter
how quickly we turn away.
You are here now.
Remember: this too
made America.
Sound your voice.
--Tim Seibles
Photography: Raul Rodriguez