RENEE BILLINGSLEA

Renee Billingslea creates art that addresses issues of race and injustice in the United States. She teaches photography at Santa Clara University.

Her exhibit, "The Fabric of Race: Racial Violence and Lynching in America," includes hundreds of white dress shirts burned and stained, each with a hand-embroidered identity tag which hang from a gallery wall honoring forgotten victims. On a shelf sits an assortment of rusty canning jars, filled with disturbing images, body parts, teeth and ashes, objects that represent souvenirs collected by people who attended the thousands of lynchings of primarily black men, women and children in the U.S. The work also addresses the perpetrators and lynch mobs. A line of hand-made hats include text stating what each man experienced or the role he played as a mob member.