The Backstory

SHOTGUN*! PUT ON YOUR RED DRESS! is a project of Whitfield CoLabs that will be led by Tony Whitfield as a part of an ongoing body of multimedia autobiographical works that document his experience as a queer, African American artist born in 1954. A reconfigurable multimedia installation, the SHOTGUN!... project will use 2342 North 22nd St, the location of the family home bought by Tony’s maternal grandparents after migrating during the Great Depression from the small town of South Boston, Virginia, as its primary point of reference for the development and presentation of new, yet primally interconnected, relationships between Tony and three of his male cousins who spent significant parts of their childhood in that house: Wink, Peter and Jim, now all in the process of becoming elders, in families dominated by women.  SHOTGUN!...will serve as a context for the exploration of their life stories, punctuated by struggles with the realities, versus idealizations, of “family” and personal identity, with the evolution of belief systems, with issues of addiction and poverty, histories of various forms of abuse, each having sought and employed various therapies that have resulted in ongoing strategies that enable the survival and flourishing of their ethics, and talents, producing distinctly different legacies and the grace they embody.

 

Central to development of this project will be two reference points: the racially motivated uprising in North Philadelphia in August of 1964, that destroyed the economic base of that neighborhood, two weeks after Tony, his mother, step-father and infant sister moved away from the family home; and the R&B hit, “Shotgun,”released by Junior Walker and the All-Stars early in 1965 which provides a context for explorations of race, gender, violence, policing and social justice as facets of a revived and reconfigured intersections of civil rights movements currently at the forefront of American consciousness in the context of the Trump era and the COVID-19 pandemic.