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Downtown Walking Exploration *

with Visiting Artist Sabine Schmidt

Fayetteville's downtown includes numerous places that tell stories of Black residents whose history is not well known.

Explore the area around the library, look for historical clues, learn about people and events, and gain a better understanding of the many layers of Fayetteville memory. Please wear comfortable shoes and clothing, and bring water.

Photographer and writer Sabine Schmidt was born and raised in Germany and lives in the Ozarks. She holds an MFA in literary translation from the University of Arkansas. Her work has appeared in exhibitions and publications in the United States and Germany, including National Geographic and Rolling Stone. For the Winthrop Rockefeller Institute’s 2018 Art in Its Natural State program, she created the walk-in sculpture (In)Visible House, which explored themes of home and memory. Schmidt won an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Arkansas Arts Council in 2018 and the annual Artist Award from the Arkansas Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in 2021. Her book Remote Access: Small Public Libraries in Arkansas (co-authored with Don House) was published in 2021. She is the recipient of a 2022 Artists 360 grant, awarded by the Mid-America Arts Alliance.

During Sabine’s time as a visiting artist, she will continue her work on Rememorials, an ongoing series of color film photography which features paper models of vanished homes, schools, businesses, and other buildings. To create the photos, she researches places of racial injustice in Arkansas, then constructs scale model buildings that serve as visual reminders of what happened at each location.  The paper structures, photos, and stories return shape to the fading knowledge of what happened in those places, opening up opportunities for learning, understanding, and atonement. Her public programs will provide a local focus that shows how important it is to be aware of our area’s history, engage with it and take responsibility for it.

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