At the corner of South Main and Huling, on the sidewalk around Urevbu Contemporary, look down. You’ll see tiles marked with titles like Tulsa 1921; Johnstown, PA, 1923 Massacre; and Memphis Massacre 1866. Scan the QR code with your phone, and you’ll be led to a page revealing the history behind the titles.
All of this is part of Ephraim Urevbu’s The Naked Truth Art Project, a project, he says, that’s been nine years in the making. “What we wanted to do was [find a way to] use the arts to ignite conversation,” Urevbu says. “While I was doing this project, I was asking people questions like, ‘Do you know anything about Memphis Massacre of 1866?’ A lot of Memphians who live here don’t even know about that. I have to come from Africa to just to share it. … But how can we genuinely begin to address some of these differences we have if we don’t know what is causing it? So, I wanted to go back to the beginning, bringing up all these stories.
“Let us talk about these stories, engage each other about them. And maybe we can have a common space where we can really begin to reason together. That is what this project is all about. … The reason we’re doing tiles is because not too many people come to galleries and museums, so we created tiles with QR codes on them.”
The project goes beyond the tiles, though, as it’s an ongoing collection of over a hundred works exploring American history — the history that America is most ashamed of — its violence, racial injustice, mass shootings. “American history is a rich history,” Urevbu says. “There is the good; there’s the bad; there’s the ugly. [That’s true for the] history of every other country in the world, but every other country in the world embraces their stories. America wants to run away from their story, which is disastrous in the end, because if you don’t know your stories, there’s a tendency for us to repeat them.”
In that vein, layers of mixed media, including newspaper and magazine print, in the tile art indicate a need to uncover what’s underneath. “Our stories our embedded, hidden,” Urevbu says. “So, what I’m doing [with the tiles] is … I’m encouraging people to peel [back the layers]; as you peel, things like this begin to show up. … Each of these events ended up with blood being spilled. That’s why you see the red dots. It’s like spilling of blood. Sometimes I have to go real graphic to get people’s attention.”
As of the official unveiling of the tiles on June 19th, The Naked Truth Art Project has installed 12 tiles, all of which were manufactured in Italy to last 100 years of weather and foot traffic, but the goal is to install more in Memphis and one day have them all over America. “We have a big ambition here,” Urevbu says. “Memphis should be proud of this project. Memphis should own this project. Memphis should run with this project because this is a project that a lot of cities would be dying to have.”
The Naked Truth Art Project, Urevbu Contemporary, 410 South Main, on view now.