Ebony Frison 2025

Abstract

Echoes of American Apartheid is a multidisciplinary thesis that weaves personal memory with historical archive to examine the enduring impact of racial segregation and systemic violence in the United States. Central to this project are my own lived experiences—as a Black woman, veteran, and artist—and the Forgotten Frontlines archive, a collection of over 1,000 rarely seen photographs taken by Newton Carroll, an African American army photographer during World War II. Through photogravure, painting, and prose, this work bears witness to the psychological, emotional, and spiritual residue of American apartheid. By confronting the visual and emotional dissonance of Black life—between visibility and erasure, service and betrayal, memory and myth—the project offers both a reckoning and a reverence. It creates space for ancestral presence, collective grieving, and reimagined belonging. Influenced by thinkers such as bell hooks, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin, Echoes of American Apartheid is at once altar and archive, resistance and remembrance—a gesture toward healing through radical seeing.