In Faithful Remembrance

“In faithful remembrance of Cornelia Phillips Spencer, and to the truth-loving people of North Carolina”

Artist: Lauren Frances Adams

Artist Lauren Frances Adams has created a site-specific public art project at the Center for the Study of the American South, on view beginning in August 2020. Adams’ project intervenes throughout the Center’s location in a historic home on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The installation encompasses sculptures that evoke the historic fire screens found in house museums from the antebellum era in the United States, as well as a wallpaper display that depicts an illusory excavation into the walls of the building, the former home of Cornelia Phillips Spencer whose influence on the university was intertwined with her political activism that advanced Lost Cause Confederate mythology in the postbellum era. The title of the project takes on the position of Spencer as the “woman who rang the bell” at the University when classes resumed during the post-Civil War period. The title also refers to the concept of how exposure to gross inequity, in this case the reality of Spencer’s White supremacist beliefs, is cause for reconsideration and dismantling of the honorific position she has been placed into in UNC history.