Designer Curry J. Hackett constructs this world with dried tobacco leaves sourced near his family’s farmland in Prospect, Virginia. For the artist, the tobacco is “an unlikely celebration of an otherwise haunting crop."
Curry J. Hackett
So That You All Won’t Forget: Speculations on a Black Home in Rural Virginia
Curry J. Hackett and Wayside Studio, Installation of “So That You All Won’t Forget: Speculations on a Black Home in Rural Virginia” in Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Photo: Elliot Goldstein © Smithsonian Institution
Tobacco is typically associated with enslaved labor or nicotine addiction, but my relationship to it is more nostalgic, since my family grew and sold it on land that they owned for generations.” Whether lair, nest, or refuge, this immersive space is punctuated by Hackett’s collection of what he calls “speculative objects,” including an embellished church fan, cast-iron skillets set amid rustling leaves, and collaged video channels.
Hackett notes that his mother’s painting is the only object in the space that he has not remixed, imagined, or pulled from artificial intelligence. He says: “Everything else is my speculation on what life on that land was like or could be.” In this rendition of home, Hackett presents something that shifts between a memory, a near future, and an alternate history for Black people in the rural South, outside of our present time but somehow — through smell, sight, or touch — still within reach.
Made in collaboration with Penny Stiff Hackett. Tobacco leaves sourced from Total Leaf Supply of Clarksville, Virginia. Video typography courtesy of Vocal Type.