Wesley Chapel CME, Corsicana, TX (Shard, Fragment, Fugue)
2021-24: History is an imperfect archive, a jagged and fractured window to the past. Despite the importance of Black contributions to Corsicana, Texas’s economic, cultural, and spiritual legacy, only shards of Black presence can be found in the town’s public history: a broken plaque, a faded tombstone, the frame of a house.
In this installation, poet and Meetinghouse Revival founder Alysia Nicole Harris frames the group’s work to restore the abandoned Wesley Chapel Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. This CME congregation was one of several Black churches in Corsicana dating back to the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction era. Using a mixture of oral interviews, archival material, and personal poetic reflections on the restoration process, Harris platforms the stories of Wesley Chapel, past and present. She hopes this installation sheds light on the many Black place-keeping efforts happening across Texas.
During her research, Harris scoured the online records of local newspapers such as the Corsicana Daily Sun, Oil City Afro-American, and Dallas Express for any mention of the church. From these mentions, she creates blackout poems to enact on the public archive the same intentional erasures and omissions enacted on Black Corsicanans. However, this time, the blackout poems work in service of Black residents to reveal layered truths about life in rural Texas. These texts are arranged into identical 12 x 16 frames and then positioned among contemporary and archival photos of the building to create a grid of historical fragments that mirrors the church’s broken stained glass. While the picture remains incomplete, glimpses of the past come into view.
Alysia is a warrior-poet-linguist. She received her Ph.D. in linguistics from Yale University, her MFA in creative writing from NYU, and her seal of the Holy Spirit from Christ Jesus. Her performance poetry testifies to humanity’s trifold nature as embodied souls/ soulful bodies imbued with the Spirit of Life. Trained as a linguist, she is interested in how language means and mediates our relationships with the seen and Unseen. As a warrior, she uses storytelling and prayer in the creative practices of social intervention and spiritual intercession. Alysia also serves as executive director of Meetinghouse Revival, an organization that preserves Black history by restoring Black churches.
A joint project of the Ministry in the City HUB and Walls-Ortiz Gallery at City Seminary, the Creative Community Care Virtual Residency brought together socially-engaged Christian creatives from New York City, Indianapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles, Charlotte, and Corsicana (Tx) for peer mentor support, learning, and sharing. In 2021, residents developed local projects in their respective cities, exploring creative practices of care in the context of community. Projects engaged the concerns and questions of the pandemic period (mutual aid, care re-imagined for social distance, etc.) at the intersection of the arts, learning, faith, and the city. In 2022, the resident pairs offered public online workshops. Starting in 2024, Creative Community Care, a traveling group exhibition of the artwork will be on display with related programming in cities across North America. In 2024, the exhibition has been on view in Santa Ana, CA (March 1-5), Houston, TX (August 7-23), and will be in St. Paul, MN (November 1 - December 15). In 2025, it will go to Indianapolis, IN (March - April), Charlotte, NC (May-June), and possibly Boston, MA (November). For 2026, we anticipate a stop in Toronto, ON (Canada) before a final show in New York City.
