Celine
Photos by Wendy Ewald

The Carver neighborhood lies to the west of Jackson Ward and downtown Richmond, adjacent to Virginia Commonwealth University. First settled by European immigrants in the mid-1800s, it later became a predominantly African American community of freed slaves. Many residents owned and worked in small businesses in the immediate area. With the shift of residential demographics during the 1950s, however, the neighborhood began to decline. By the 1970s, it had fallen into disrepair and was struggling for its survival. Barbara Abernathy, a longtime resident who heads the Carver Area Civic Improvement League, has been instrumental in shaping the revitalization efforts that now are transforming this urban community. "For the past 25 years, residents of Carver have fought to revitalize our neighborhood and make it a place where families can come together," she says. "We've worked hard to bring this positive change to Carver, to make it a place where people will want to raise their children."

Ewald notes, "It was exciting for me to work with a community that had defined itself and its goals—the most important being to maintain its integrity as a family community. I wanted to make an installation that built on these aspirations. One source of inspiration was a recent trip to Berlin, where I visited the site of Checkpoint Charlie, now marked not by the Berlin Wall but by a pair of enormous, larger-than-life portraits of two young soldiers—an American and a Russian—mounted on a pole. It was a simple yet striking memorial of what had gone on there. With this in mind, I decided to make portraits of the children of Carver and of some of the things precious to them and their families, in order to create an intimate reminder of who lives inside the houses that outsiders pass by every day."

Ashley Kistler
Curator, Hand Workshop Art Center