Lava Thomas: Homecoming brings together, for the first time, thirteen drawings in Thomas’ revelatory series Mugshot Portraits: Women of the Montgomery Bus Boycott (2018–); the multimedia installation Looking Back (2015–2021); and Decatur (2022), a new set of drawings that debuted at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, and will travel next to Spelman College. Mugshot Portraits: Women of the Montgomery Bus Boycott depicts women who were arrested for participating in the city’s 1955–1956 boycott in Alabama. The thirteen month boycott was expertly planned, largely by women, well before Rosa Parks triggered it by refusing to give up her seat. It is regarded as the first large-scale U.S. demonstration against segregation. Lava’s project takes photographic documents out of the criminal archive and translates them into life-size, handmade, loving homages. Thomas explains, “The drawings are rendered in pencil on paper to call attention to the fragility of this history, the ease with which it can be erased if it isn’t adamantly preserved.”
Indeed. Bridget Cooks, the brilliant curator of the show, worked tirelessly for months to identify, invite, and gather descendants of these remarkable women for the opening on April 28, 2022 in Montgomery, which we were honored to attend. The descendants flew in from around the country. Some of them shared the remarkable fact that they had not previously been aware their ancestors were heroic women of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Jo Ann Gibson Robinson is one of the heroines of the boycott, and one of the women depicted in Lava’s exhibit. To read the whole untold story of the boycott and the women who started it, we recommend her memoir, Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson.