Woven Wind is coming to Natchez

Program to feature clay exhibit and “Toles Family” film

By Roscoe Barnes III
Natchez, MS, USA / ListenUpYall.com
Apr 10, 2025 | 2:31 PM

Terry Minor of Detroit, Michigan, is a member of the Toles family. He is being interviewed by Marlos Evan and Vesna  Pavlović from the Woven Wind team for the "Toles Family: Coming Home" film. The interview took place in 2021 at the Natchez Museum of African American History and Culture. (Click on image to enlarge.)

NATCHEZ, Miss. – The Natchez Museum of African American History and Culture will host the Woven Wind project featuring clay vessels and the showing of the film in progress, “Toles Family: Coming Home,” on Friday, April 25, at 301 Main St., Natchez.

 
The event, which will feature a talk and reception, will be held from 4 to 5 p.m. It is free and open to the public.
 
The film includes oral histories of the descendants of the late Tom Toles’ family who was enslaved at Monmouth plantation. Members of the family, like the late Mary Lee Davis Toles, became prominent members of the Natchez community.
 
Mary Lee Davis Toles, who was Tom Toles’ wife, served as an Adams County Justice Court Judge and president of the Natchez NAACP. She was also a founding member of NAPAC museum.
 
The exhibition and film will be preceded by Woven Wind’s community clay workshop, which is set for 12 to 2 p.m. Friday, at the Mississippi School of Folk Arts at 5 E Franklin St., Natchez. The workshop is also free to the public.
 
“‘Woven Wind’ is a living, breathing project that evolves with each exhibition, workshop, and performance,” said Vesna Pavlović, the Paul E. Shwab Chair in Fine Arts Professor of Art at Vanderbilt University.
 
According to Nashville-based curator Courtney Adair Johnson, Woven Wind is a multi-layered artistic endeavor grounded in critical research on the Lovell-Quitman archive at the University of the South, Sewanee.
 
“Extensive plantation records, photographs, and objects found in the archive, document the lives of the officer William Storrow Lovell and wife Antonia, whose father was John A. Quitman (1799-1858), a large slave owner and former governor of Mississippi,” she said.
 
Johnson noted the inventories of the enslaved people produced in 1858 after Quitman's death led their team of artists with a genealogist to locate a family of descendants.
 
“Following this lead, the team met the Toles family to record their oral histories and examine America's history of slavery and bondage using their voice,” she said. “In the film, family members talk about tracing and searching for their ancestors, the value of repair, the legacy of racism, and how it affected their family. They also share their thoughts on moving forward and what reparations could look like.”
 
As for the clay workshop, it will include a trip to Monmouth, where community members will place unfired clay objects on site, Johnson said. Monmouth was Quitman’s former family home where the Toles family ancestors were enslaved.
 
“The clay objects, which symbolically carry the voices of the enslaved, will dissolve with the landscape over time to memorialize the site of the family's painful history,” Johnson said.
 
Woven Wind is supported by many institutions, the list of which includes: the National Endowment for the Arts Grant for Arts Projects; Vanderbilt University Scaling Success Grant; Mellon Partners for Humanities Education Collaboration Grant; Vanderbilt University’s Engine for Art, Democracy, and Justice; Tennessee State University; Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy Catalyst Grant; the Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation at the University of the South, Sewanee; and Natchez Museum of African American History and Culture.
 
For more information, call 601-445-0728.