will the u.s. ever be us

photography by rachel riley

opening reception friday february 5, 5-8pm
on display through february 27th

Cottonwood Center for the Arts is honored to present the photography of Rachel Riley for the month of February. Riley maintains a photography studio and lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

“Watching the murder of George Floyd in May of 2020, my heart connected fully to the sickness and sorrow being felt across the nation.” In that moment she realized the importance of adding her voice to the collective moment as a recorder and storyteller. Riley attended and documented her first protest on May 28th, 2020. From that first experience, she traveled the country - chronicling women’s marches, and protests for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, with her journey taking her all the way to the White House and beyond.

Capturing solidarity, sorrow, anger, fear, triumph and progress with her lens, Riley’s photography shares every detail of humanity demanding change.

We invite you to participate in the dialogue and experience Rachel Riley’s work for the month of February.

artist statement:

“I am a tried and true, native New Yorker from a proud Puerto Rican family. My husband serves in the Military and having moved three times in as many years, we settled in Colorado with our two sons.

About six years ago I decided to take my curiosity and love of photography to another level and began taking classes at The Bemis School of Art. After attending virtually every photography class they offered, I decided it was time to pursue a degree at Pikes Peak Community College. 

During my time at PPCC, I was compelled to tell stories and capture the complexities of the human experience through my own lens. Early on in my degree path it became evident that my developing skill set and my passion for storytelling through photography might not limit me to just commercial photography. 

I began to experiment with angles, perspectives and subject matter. I was invited to show my work in the 2017 “Voices of the Street” exhibit in the PPCC Studio Art Gallery. This was a collaborative photo essay and multi artist show, with a focus on fine art and street photography. 

I was also selected as a first-place winner and the Directors Choice recipient in the 2018 Art Student Exhibit. That same year I also placed second in the ADDYS (The American Advertising Awards) student division. 

What was becoming clear to me is that photography was not just a hobby, or a fleeting interest. I realized that my path with the lens was changing and developing. And while it would be challenging at times to balance between developing who and what type of photographer I wanted to be and the well-being of my family, I realized that I could give myself over to both. My family is my steadfast support system and inspiration for all that I do. 

As I began to get clarity and trust in my instincts to capture the human moments that tell the stories, my world began to change rapidly. This new vision would inspire me in ways I had never thought possible. 

All of this history has instilled in me a primordial desire to capture this important moment in history. 

In May of 2020, I graduated from Pikes Peak Community College Phi Theta Kapp, with an AAS in Professional Photography. It was just a week later that I watched the horrible video of George Floyd’s murder. My eldest son sat with me, in shock, with palpable fear in his eyes. My heart connected fully to the sickness and sorrow that black mothers all over the country had been feeling. My son, their son, our sons were, and still are, being murdered. 

I knew then, that like those mothers and fathers screaming, begging for justice for the murdering of our children to stop, I too needed to add my voice to this collective moment. I wanted my sons to see how powerful change is born from action, and how action can come in many forms. For some, it is marching, for others it is in bearing witness, storytelling, being a recorder, of the growing pains of change. 

I decided to attend the first protests in Denver on May 28th to begin this quest. After continuing on to the Colorado Springs protests on May 30th, I realized that this was what I had to be doing. I wanted to document and capture the meaning of these protests and record how different parts of our country viewed injustice; how our collective nation viewed these various happenings and how this all could inspire much needed revolution. 

This would be my post graduate body of work and my photographic journey of storytelling.

I began by mapping out where I knew there had been the most controversial protests resulting from George Floyd’s murder, but also wanted to include other locations that were relevant to the current narrative. As luck would have it, or rather history in the making would have it, the first stop on my route was Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the current president had decided to hold his first rally since the pandemic started. This rally was to be held on the weekend of Juneteenth, the commemorative date of the end of slavery. Not only was this disturbing and blatantly dishonoring American history it was also completely tone deaf. The President’s planners were equally disconnected in their selection of location as they chose Tulsa, where it was also the 99th anniversary of the massacre and devastation of Black Wall Street on May 31st-June 1st 1921.

As I walked down streets trying to capture the strange symbiosis of black history with an equally impactful reclamation of power and of Tulsa’s historical narrative, I saw in that community a powerful ray of hope and inspiration. My time was spent, that historic weekend, taking photos and talking to the people who were decedents of Black Wall Street’s original residents. 

After Tulsa, came Louisville, KY, where the Breonna Taylor memorial was growing daily, with totems of shared grief and loss. The people of Louisville formed a sacred shrine, untouched and undisturbed by the movement and energy of the protests happening all around the streets. This was on June 23rd, a day the election polls closed early. As I spoke to the people gathering with handwritten signs of resistance, their fists in the air, yelling “no justice, no peace”, I could see true fear and anger in the eyes of the younger marchers, an anger so  deep that fear of reprisal far outweighed their need to express themselves. An anger I saw sparking its cold flame in my own son’s eyes as we watched George Floyd’s life be taken. 

Through all of this, I was able to capture images of the King Louis XVI statue, another monument honoring a controversial historical figure, before it was ultimately taken down in September. These misguided statues, representing the ultimate symbols of slave ownership, social and physical oppression, pain, suffering, and disfunction of the Confederacy had to be removed. 

This was additionally the case with the Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond VA., where the towering monument had been decorated and reclaimed in words of liberation, oppression, anger and frustration. The bright script and letters layered upon each other into a cacophony of revolution. This statue, an obvious relic and icon of slavery, is still in the storm of controversy and, at the time of writing this, has been blocked from removal, pending more hearings.

My journey then led me to Washington DC., where the Black Lives Matter mural was painted on the road as the White house sits barricaded, like a bunker. This, the road to the White House, the Peoples House, behind a cage, brought tears to my eyes. In many ways, it was the symbol of my journey, the irony, of an administration barricading itself away from the revolution brought to its doors. 

On one side of the street was a stripped-down “movie set”, empty, almost sterile with a feeling of hollowness, and on the other, facing the White House, a collage of protest signs and banners that had been layered on to scaffolding, spanning four blocks. All as if the streets were tattooed skin, breathing and pulsing with the energy of the people. The eeriness and silence were breathtaking. A person could hear footsteps echoing from the walkways. As if no one in attendance wanted to break the silent standoff between two sides of the same street. 

I took a few moments to look at this big white castle, this center of truth, justice and democracy, where two years prior I had photographed my son, now completely unreachable by anyone. Fortressed with concrete pylons, chain-link gates and secret service, blank faced, eyes forward, I asked one of them how they felt about keeping the people out of the people’s house and he simply replied, “I am just doing my job, that’s all I’m doing”. 

I wanted to end my trip at the Fort Scott Community College, home to the prolific documentary photographer Gordon Parks’ museum. Parks remains one of my favorites because of how he has documented the voiceless in America - the people less likely to have their stories told. 

As I toured the museum, taking in how profound his work is, I found myself standing in front of his 1945 image “American Gothic.” I realized how critical it is to have the documentarians of the human experience capture these moments. 

Truth, is what I must capture. My job, my life, is to bear witness to the telling of human stories. No matter how painful these stories may be, I must tell and record what I see. I do this for my sons, whose eyes must see truth, be moved to take action, and to observe my actions that will, ultimately, help to manifest change.  I am a storyteller; I am a photographer.”

~ Rachel Riley