“Much of [Mary Frances] Whitfield’s work depicts these stories from the days of slavery] — of picking cotton, singing songs, and other images of life for black Americans in days past. But Whitefield’s art shifted when she made a trip to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in the early 1990s, where she saw images of lynching and the Ku Klux Klan. Whitfield could not shake the images and the feelings they produced in her mind. So she began to exorcise them the only way she knew how: by painting them.” – PBS NewsHour