Colleen Mullins

The women’s suffrage movement has such a complicated history. To celebrate the 100th birthday of the 19th amendment, is to celebrate a milestone of privileged histories and barely veiled institutionalized white supremacy, and yet….

An amendment to the Constitution of the United States, isn’t anything about which to sneeze. But until the 1965, African-American women were omitted from this calculus we now celebrate. It is perhaps for this reason, that my neighbor Frankie, and her downsizing and move to an assisted living community at age 95, became the focus of my gaze the last many months.

In 1976, when I was nine, Frankie moved into an apartment on the first floor of the 12-unit building in which I grew up. She later married and she and her husband lived in our building through my childhood, departure for college and life, and subsequent return here in 2014. It wasn’t until she decided there wouldn’t be wall space in their new apartment for all of her framed accolades of a career in community service, that my attention was drawn to the walls of the nerve-center of activities in their apartment, her office. The images of her office, now dismantled, resonated in a new way with the lens of the pandemic. That as we age, and get around less, these nerve centers not only become the center of our memories and connections to history, but essential centers to keep an active voice in community. It occurs to me that the phrase “vote with your feet” is a mirror of this time in history where we aren’t to go out, and the idea that this room allowed her to push her activism outward.

Over our 44-year relationship our orbit to one another has remained steady, but as I grew from an only child in a building with no other children, to an artist and arts administrator, we started to know each other with different filters. Her life’s path and works have been in and through the many places marking incredible histories.

From her earliest memories in the Parsonage House of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, where her father was the Reverend, decades before Martin Luther King Jr. would matriculate to the position to participating in the March on Washington, she’s been there. At 95 she still serves on the board of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. And when she had me photograph her objects, before discarding them, I realized that for me, the power in any one law is that they are bricks in a foundation of power, and we are all, with our feet and votes, the mortar. Frankie is mortar.