Mary Beth Meehan
I Shall Wear a Crown
By the time Annye Raye Pitts was born, in 1933, American women had been granted the right to vote for over a decade. Yet as an African-American woman in the South, Pitts would have to leave her birthplace of Montgomery, Alabama, and make a new home in Providence, Rhode Island, in order to seek full enfranchisement as an American citizen under the law.
I Shall Wear A Crown is part of an ongoing collaboration between Mary Beth Meehan – photographer, writer, and Pitts’s friend; and Jonathan Pitts-Wiley –photographer, history educator, theater director, and Pitts’s grandson. Together they seek to document, interpret, and share her vast archive, collected over her journey of the next six decades.
Consisting of scholarly texts and newspaper clippings devoted to African-American history, Gospel recordings, letters, photographs, clothing, and accessories, Pitts’s archive tells the story of a life lived assured of her own divine value as a human being, even as she walked a path constricted by a racist America.
I Shall Wear A Crown presents a selection of her more than 100 church hats, echoing the majestic hats worn by the 20th-century Suffragettes, but reminding us of the African-American women who were left out of that contract.
The project title refers to one of many songs sung by Pitts in her lifetime as an accomplished Gospel singer. Image titles are drawn from its lyrics.
Annye Raye Pitts passed away, in Providence, in 2018.
MARY BETH MEEHAN is a photographer, writer, and educator, who has spent more than twenty-five years embedding herself in communities across the United States. Beginning in her native New England, and continuing in the Midwest, the American South and in Silicon Valley, her work combines image, text, and large-scale public installation, to question notions of identity, visibility and equity in communities. Co-opting the scale of celebrity and advertising, Meehan’s portrait banners activate public spaces and spark conversations among the people who inhabit them.
Meehan’s most recent project, “Seeing Newnan,” was featured on the Sunday front page of The New York Times in January of 2020, and has shifted the dialogue about representation, identity, and race in that small Georgia city – and nationwide.
Meehan has held residencies at Stanford University, the University of Missouri School of Journalism, and at Brown University upcoming in 2021. She has lectured and led workshops at the School of Visual Arts, New York, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Her first book, Silicon Valley and the New America, with Fred Turner, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.
instagram: @marybethmeehan
