Echoes In Silhouette

Some people are remembered through portraits, monuments, and carefully preserved stories. However, too often many Black people were recorded only as property, labor, numbers on a page, or not at all. They were relegated to being a shadow on the edge of someone else's history. Echoes in Silhouette begins in that absence.

Created by artist and storyteller Hannah Drake, Echoes in Silhouette is an evolving public art series that calls forward the lives history has pushed into the shadows. Through life-size silhouettes installed in historic sites and public spaces, the work gives presence to enslaved children, freedom seekers, laborers, dreamers, survivors, and others whose full humanity was rarely preserved.

The figures are intentionally faceless, inviting the viewer to imagine who that person could have been. Each silhouette asks us to look beyond what history recorded and imagine the life that was lived. The silhouettes do not tell us everything about the people they represent. However, they confront us with how much was never recorded, never preserved, or never considered worthy of remembering. 

Echoes in Silhouette repopulates the historic landscape by placing human presence back onto grounds where absence has become normalized. Adult silhouettes depict the reality of labor under enslavement, while the children inhabit what could have been, imagining the play, wonder, creativity, rest, and freedom they deserved. Together, the figures hold two truths in the same landscape: what was demanded of them, and what should have belonged to them.

Echoes in Silhouette refuses to let silence have the final word.

They were here, and now they are stepping out of the shadows.