In Lottie’s Living Room traces a story that emanates from local lived experience and reveals the complex interdependence of land, community, and culture. Taking root in her family’s multigenerational stewardship of land in Windsor, North Carolina, acres once tended by enslaved ancestors, Speller’s installation addresses interwoven histories and creates a space in which new futures might be embodied.

In Lottie’s Living Room marks the transition of these lands through generations, and the tremendous efforts to maintain these acres within the family. In the last one hundred years, discriminatory government policies and white supremacist violence radically changed the scale of Black land ownership – resulting in the loss of just under one million Black farmers and a 90 percent loss in their acreage. Speller’s work communicates within this context, yet expands outwards toward the continuing cultural memory that both honors these sacrifices and sustains her family, and many others.

This installation builds up on her 2019 Relics of Home installation at the Paramount Center for the Arts in St. Cloud, Minnesota, which presented material from the land in North Carolina and its buildings – clothes, living room furniture, cotton – alongside Speller’s photographic documentation of the place and her relatives. In Lottie’s Living Room continues this inquiry into how everyday objects and family stories can honor their local dynamics and also sing into a shared continuum of cultural experience. Speller’s work in this series also includes objects from her family life growing up in California, items that suggest further forms of inheritance within the Black rural diaspora. “Each installation is a representation of a fragmented memory, now passed on to me,” Speller shares. “A physical embodiment of the intersection of memory and myth.”