Tieshka K. Smith at the opening reception of her residency on August 8, standing in front of the portraits she took in 2015. (Photo: Rasheed Z. Ajamu)

Over a decade after launching #RacismIsASickness at G-Town Radio, photographer and writer Tieshka K. Smith returns to where it all began with #10YearsOfRacismIsASickness, a four-month residency that reflects on how conversations around different forms of racism have evolved since then.

Launched in 2015 as a community art and photography project, #RacismIsASickness invited participants to reflect on their experience with racism while sparking conversations about community healing. The new residency, unveiled August 1, revisits the project and its evolution through photography, maps, archival materials, and various programming.

“I wanted to use the material from the original project to reimagine things, and then also speak to the passage of time,” Smith said. “I also wanted to acknowledge that the project was created in this space, but the final result, the installation that traveled, was never shown at G-Town Radio or anywhere in Germantown, so I wanted to give people a taste of that.”

The project became a public exhibition at various venues across the city throughout 2016 and 2017.

During the current four-month residency, Smith will bring components from those public exhibitions to allow space for similar conversations in the community, 

The front of the building features a window installation titled All Roads Lead Back to G-Town Radio, a three-panel map showing where the project’s original participants traveled from on their journey to G-Town Radio.

The graphic design for the installation was designed by local graphic designer Beth Miner, with the original visual identity by local neighbor Angela Miles.

Inside the building is the project’s “Green Room,” which includes maps showing the different venues the public exhibition visited, along with images of how communities interacted with them. The maps also highlight historic Black sites in those communities.

All the maps have QR codes that direct viewers to videos further showing the project’s formation, as well as the public exhibition’s travel and its participants.

The original 14 portraits taken in 2015 are also present, edited and aged by Smith to look more archival and to represent the passage of time.

There is also a text installation called the community wall, where visitors can respond to reflective prompts on sticky notes and add them to the wall to continue the conversation.

Local drum artist and poet Karen Smith found #10YearsofRacismIsASickness to be thought-provoking, saying, “It’s important to put our art on the line like that when talking about some real issues.”

Karen said that kind of dialogue, as seen in Tieshka’s work, remains necessary.

She said, “I don’t think we talk enough about racism; we still fall back into thinking that it’s fading out. It’s only getting stronger every day. Everybody needs to be uncomfortable talking about this problem.”

A look into how the project began

The concept of racism as a “sickness” was shaped partly by Tieshka’s experience in population health in New York.

“I kind of put that hat back on and thought, ‘What if it behaves like a virus?” Smith said. “I wanted to use visual language to communicate that, versus stats, data, citations, and all that stuff.”

Smith said the project took shape after she saw a video of a 2015 incident in McKinney, Texas, that heavily disturbed her, in which a police officer pinned a Black teenage girl to the ground at a pool party while pointing his gun at others.

“I’ve been watching these cases dating back to Trayvon Martin and even before him… I grew up in the age of Rodney King,” Smith said. “I said, ‘I got to get off the sideline about police brutality and the way that it targets people of color, particularly black people.”

At the time, Smith lived near Queen Lane and Greene Street. She invited community members to sign a solidarity banner for the McKinney community in Texas, which was then ripped down on July 4 of that year.

G-Town Radio offered Smith their space soon after, where she would then begin the #RacismIsASickness project in 2015. Over a six-week span, which she calls the production phase, Smith put out an open call for folks to have their portraits taken for the project, followed by one-on-one conversations.

Fourteen people helped co-create the project by sitting for portraits with masks in front of an upside-down flag, which Smith described as a “distress call” symbolizing her concern for the nation.

“I was signaling this idea that for me, it felt like the country was in trouble,” Smith said. “Now remember this was in 2015 — it seemed like an escalation of state-sanctioned violence on the part of law enforcement. I wasn’t too confident that it was going to die down.”

On their masks, they were asked to write a word that describes an aspect of racism they have struggled with.

“We had really deep conversations about their earliest experiences of racism: who they were learning potentially harmful ideas about race from, the most traumatic experiences they’ve had, and these conversations got pretty deep pretty quick.”

Of the 14 participants, seven were from Germantown, and seven were from other parts of the city. The group was also evenly split between Black and white participants.

After moving to Southwest Philly in 2016, Smith brought the portraits with her and went public with the project in various venues, inviting folks from different communities to join the conversation.

“I was going through speaking engagements and talking to people, and just really kind of advancing this idea of racism as this kind of virus that kind of morphs and mutates, and it’s invisible to us, and it manifests in different ways, different systems, different people.”

Throughout 2016 and 2017, exhibitions were held at locations such as the Art Church of West Philadelphia, Community College of Philadelphia, and the Philadelphia Ethical Society.

Moving the conversation forward

There will also be programming available to the community throughout the residency, which Smith calls Activations.

She will host a monthly Chat and Chew during the residency, featuring in-depth discussions of immigration and voting rights, how those issues have evolved over the past decade, and possible responses. She is still looking for speakers to help lead those conversations.

Smith will also be holding commemorative button-making exercises, where attendees can walk into the space and express their creativity and desired messages through designing a personal button.

The space will also be opened as one of the destinations in the Philadelphia Open Studio Tours on Saturday, October 10, and Sunday, October 11.

“Then the final thing in November that I want to do is bring back some of the 14 people and have a conversation with them about their experience sitting for these portraits, collaborating with me on these portraits, looking back on the experience, and then kind of catapulting back into the present,” Smith said.

Smith has long explored how police brutality, immigration rights, public health crises, and other systemic issues affect people of color. Looking back, she feels the project anticipated the direction many of those issues would take.

“…it’s evolved. We’re talking about ICE being a factor now, and the policing in their mission to root out folks who are here illegally, but they’re using tactics that I recall seeing in the 2010s,” Smith said. “Now looking back on it, I was just like ‘yeah, we were in trouble,’ and now I’m seeing the logical conclusion of that.”

#10YearsOfRacismIsASickness will remain at G-Town Radio’s building at 24 Maplewood Mall through November 30.

Pryce Jamison is Germantown Info Hub’s community engagement reporter and a Next City Equitable Cities Reporting Fellow. He covers Germantown and Philadelphia, with reporting that includes features, news, solution-focused and community-focused stories.