Annye Raye Pitts: WITNESS

Mixed Magic Theater (2022-2025)
Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts, 2021
The WaterFire Arts Center, 2021
Providence, Rhode Island

In 2015 Meehan met Annye Raye Pitts, who in 1959 had emigrated from Montgomery, Alabama, to Providence, Rhode Island. Mrs. Pitts followed the trajectory of some 6 million refugees from the Jim Crow South to northern cities. Over many visits Mrs. Pitts became a dear friend, and Meehan made her portrait. In 2018 this image was exhibited as a large-scale banner on the exterior of a building in downtown Providence. Six months later Mrs. Pitts passed away. 

At the time of her passing, Mrs. Pitts’s home was filled with the material remains of her lifelong passion – researching and recording Black history, documenting Black excellence, and bearing witness to the pushback of white supremacy. Over a thousand newspaper clippings revealed an insistent safekeeping of such testimony, along with hundreds of books, recordings, personal photographs, and scraps of paper covered with her handwriting. Amid these were hundreds of Mrs. Pitts’s church hats, dress shoes, and elegant suits, embodying the armor that she wore on her journey through this world.

Meehan understood the preciousness of these belongings, and wondered if, through an artistic intervention with their concreteness and materiality, Mrs. Pitts and her voice – important personally but also as they trace an essential arc of American history – could remain among us and reverberate in new ways. Cautiously, she approached Mrs. Pitts’s family with these thoughts and expressed her desire to try to work with what had become their mother’s archive. After many hours of conversation and consideration, the family gave Meehan their blessing to attempt this work, and agreed to collaborate with her as guides through its complexity and meaning.

The work-in-progress has been exhibited at WaterFire Arts Center, The Rhode Island Center for the Photographic Arts, and at Mixed Magic Theater, in Rhode Island. 

It is ongoing.

Close