2030 will mark one hundred years since the Marion lynching. This significant passing of time influenced many aspects of the project’s landscape design. A grove of nine maple trees is proposed immediately adjacent to the entry. Maple trees were selected because they once surrounded the Grant County Courthouse and it was a Maple ultimately used on the evening of August 7th. The tenth tree in the garden, representing the last decade in a century, will be a specially grafted tree commissioned from the artist Sam Van Aken. The tree will bloom in a variety of colors and have the capacity to bear different types of fruit during the summer. Van Aken describes his public interventions as metaphors that can communicate narratives and act as sites of place making.

Seasonality will be another aspect of the garden that embodies the passing of time. The planting palette will provide a variety of blooms from spring through fall and create an ever-changing range of color against the backdrop of Levi-Jones’ monochromatic wall. This embodies a powerful passage written by the only survivor of the lynching, Dr. James Cameron, who described in his memoir how he “began to notice the flowers,” for the first time in his life only weeks after the tragic event, and from prison. “They seemed to beckon me,” he continues: “They bloomed in rich profusion all over the yard, pale, fragile, exquisite creations of nature, full of life, fresh invigorating, exalting my soul.” Each plant species selected for the Marion Legacy garden holds specific meaning, including the crocus as a symbol of new beginnings and late-summer Allium, which represent unity and patience.

Samuel Levi Jones was born and raised in Marion, Indiana. Trained as a photographer and multidisciplinary artist, his work is informed by historical source material and early modes of representation in documentary practice. He explores the framing of power structures and struggles between exclusion and equality by desecrating historical material, then re-imagining new works. In collaboration with LAA Office, Levi Jones has translated his studio works into memorial artifacts and surfaces that can foster public discourse within urban spaces.

Sourced from decommissioned law books and encyclopedias, the abstract patterns of sewn pages informed a series of perforation studies for the Marion Legacy project. The process began by transcribing the iconography of various artworks made by Levi Jones into a series of two-dimensional line drawings. These were then applied as perforations to sheets of pulped encyclopedic pages and imagined as diaphanous metal screens with a pleated structure recalling folded books. A full-scale mock-up produced for this exhibition is made from perforated aluminum and finished with a hand-applied, liquid blackener. Linear light sources positioned behind the panels showcase the potential to poetically filter natural and artificial light.

In this documentary short, members of the Marion Legacy stakeholder team discuss their relationship with the city’s difficult history and the ongoing need to advocate for social justice. Along with the multi-generational trauma inflicted on family members and friends of the victims, the city of Marion has suffered from continued racial and social tensions for decades after the lynching. In 1969, the N.A.A.C.P. organized a protest march in Marion that was attended by over 3,000 participants in an effort to highlight ongoing inequities. The lynching’s lone survivor, Dr. James Cameron, founded America’s Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1988 after several unsuccessful attempts to start an anti-racist organization in Marion.