Elizabeth Dorbad

TWO WALKS

Memphis:   Ambassador Hotel to the Lorraine Motel.  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 1/15/29-4/4/68

Oakland:     2311 Adeline Street Warehouse to 28th & Union Street.  Bobby Hutton, 4/21/50-4/6/68

The Great Marches were actions that rooted the foundations of the civil rights movement and tipped the scales toward societal change in the U.S. In the spring of 2013, I staged walks in the cities of Oakland, California and Memphis, Tennessee in an effort to parallel some of the history. I was solitary and photographed each step with a camera pointed toward the ground. During the Holy Week Uprising in 1968, first Black Panther Bobby Hutton was shot in Oakland just two days after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. The death sites of MLK and Bobby Hutton were remarkably the same distance from the sites I had to work with in each city: my studio in west Oakland and the ghost gallery space of the former Ambassador Hotel in Memphis. The walks and the streets and the architectures became spaces for contemplation of issues regarding race, architectural memory, fear, subjugation, gun violence, gun control, right to bear arms, rise to power, separation, integration, commonality, kindness and non-violence.

The work was shown in the Ambassador Hotel in 2013 for the city-wide Memphis Social exhibition curated by Beautiful Fields and Apexart NY.

In 2014, forty-six years after the Holy Week Uprising, issues of police brutality against unarmed black individuals fueled a series of protests in the U.S. that continue today. Orations travels to the Respond exhibition at Smack Mellon Gallery in Brooklyn, NY January-February 2015.