"I created a facsimile of an edition of the TWK Monthly, a newspaper published by the Birmingham chapter of the KKK, using digitized versions of the newspaper. All aspects of the facsimile are accurate to the 1925 edition, including paper size and content; however, I altered the reproduction by removing all of the text from the articles. I did not want to perpetuate the propaganda of the Klan by reprinting the text, and I chose to highlight that the majority of the paper is advertisements rather than new. Without the text, the reader can see how the ads take up most of the pages; they can focus on reading the ad copy more closely in order to see the language used and to see how centrally located these businesses were within the city. In this form, it's clear that the publication's primary purpose was as a tool for increasing economic power. The facsimile pages were printed using a risograph copy machine which provided a fast, economic printing option and allowed me to easily reproduce all the pages of the newspaper. For this portion of the book, my priority was creating a full-scale facsimile in a large edition size true to the original printing intention, which at the time of the TWK Monthly's creation would not have been fine press printing, but rapid and simple printing. In an effort to ethically present this information, I bound the facsimile with black endsheets and housed the entire book in a wrapper, both of which provide historical information. The cover wrapper contains an essay I researched and wrote, which gives the reader context for the object, its position in history, and my proposal of its true purpose. The endsheets and wrapper are letterpress printed on higher quality paper. In this way, a hierarchy is created among the printed material in my book, and the contextual information is given more weight and power than the interior pages of the facsimile."--Artist's website, https://www.contourapress.com/books/twk-monthly
"In 1919 the United Confederate Veterans created a committee with the goal of influencing education to promote a version of history that would look back kindly on the Confederacy.... The letter included in this artist's book is a facsimile of one the committee sent to education institutions and textbook-choosing commissions around 1920. In an effort to rid public schools of textbooks that were critical of the Confederacy, this letter was paired with a pamphlet with instructions to reject any textbook that didn't contain 'truths of Confederate history.' Altered facsimiles of this pamphlet and its successor are also included in this book. Now, students are required to take a year of Alabama history in fourth grade. Textbooks selected for this course have put forth white-washed versions of history. For this artist's book, pages from the textbook used by the artist as a student were selected and printed as altered facsimiles. These textbook spreads show the persisting influence of Lost Cause mythology in education and the insidious 'truths' it relies on." — Portfolio interior back panel.