Weep No More, My Lady (Oh! Weep No More Today): Love, Violence, Printmaking, and Kentuckian Futurity

Abstract

Situated within a regressive political climate, this essay considers the writer’s thesis artwork Weep No More, My Lady as a simultaneous account of Southern gendered violence and a desire for healing. Through personal and historical connections to Kentucky’s material culture, the work navigates binaries of class, race, and gender that have dictated the dominant contemporary conception of the region. Placing the competing forces of care and brutality in dialogue, Weep No More, My Lady translates these theoretical challenges into formal attributes. The work suggests modes of making — stitching, unraveling, tearing — can act against the construction and naturalization of hierarchy in the United States. Similarly, its use of printmaking mirrors historical discourse, since printmaking is both archival and able to meaningfully break from its own repetitive precedent. Therefore, Weep No More, My Lady attempts to reconcile a harmful past with sentimental longing, seeing a way forward in the process