Tag: ruby bridges

Inside a refurbished former motel off Old Hapeville Road, artist and archivist Rosa Duffy’s first solo gallery exhibition asks visitors to reconsider how history is handled, altered, and reclaimed.

“Uncertain Data: A Counter-Reading,” on view at Hawkins HQ through Feb. 21, brings together sculpture, found materials, and archival imagery to examine how Black histories are distorted, erased, and reassembled. The exhibition, which opened this weekend, marks a milestone in Duffy’s evolving practice, which blends research-driven inquiry with tactile objects that carry symbolism rooted in lived experience.

Duffy’s work centers on what she describes as “counter-language,” the cultural systems Black communities create in response to displacement and distortion. Across approximately 16 pieces, burl wood, dice, bingo balls, sheet metal, and Xeroxed images appear repeatedly, forming a visual vocabulary shaped by excess, erosion, and survival.

“I center Black materials in my life and choose to share them with other folks,” Duffy said. “The audience that I’m speaking to when I’m making work is a Black audience. That’s who I make work for.”

The show’s title reflects Duffy’s interest in how information changes hands and how meaning is reshaped over time. Many of the works incorporate layered or partially obscured images, referencing how historical narratives are simplified, fragmented, or manipulated as they move through institutions and power structures. Numbers recur throughout the exhibition,  dice faces, pool balls, and bingo markers, often summing to seven, a figure Duffy associates with spirituality, luck, and excess.

“My mom was a mathematician. Numbers were a big part of my life,” she said. “They feel spiritual, and if I’m using gaming objects that already carry numbers, that becomes part of the language.”

Several pieces explicitly trace the movement and reduction of Black populations across geography and time. “The Sea” and “Land” function as companion works, referencing the Middle Passage, Gullah Geechee heritage, and the physical and cultural erosion that followed enslavement and migration. In “Ruby’s Bridge,” Duffy incorporates a distorted image from Ruby Bridges’ first day integrating a New Orleans school, anchoring the work in both personal research and collective memory.

“It starts iridescent and becomes duller as the vessels get smaller,” Duffy said. “It’s a very literal example of redaction, of being reduced, but not erased.”

The exhibition was developed over more than a year in collaboration with Alexander Hawkins, founder of Hawkins HQ, who said the show continues Duffy’s long-standing investigation into archives, authorship, and the construction of knowledge.

“She’s examining how knowledge is collected, who changes it, and why,” Hawkins said. “This show brings those questions into physical form in a way that feels like a natural evolution of her practice.”

Despite the show’s conceptual rigor, Duffy resists prescribing meaning to viewers, saying the work’s success is measured not by clarity or resolution, but by the conversations it sparks.

“I don’t need people to walk away saying, ‘I get it now,’” she said. “I don’t even know if I do. I just want them to feel something and talk about it.”

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