by Tessy Abade
Roanoke College hosted its sixth annual Emancipation Lecture April 15 as part of a series established in 2021 to foster deeper conversations around slavery, emancipation, and their continuing legacies in Virginia and beyond. The lecture brings together scholars, artists, and cultural thinkers whose work situates these histories within broader social and global contexts.
This year’s lecture featured visual artist and designer Veronica Jackson, presenting her talk titled “Don’t Call Me Whoopi: My Art, My Agency.”
Jackson holds an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from California College of the Arts and a background in architecture from the University of Virginia. Her career spans museum work, design, and independent studio practice. Across disciplines, her work consistently centers Black women lived experience, examining visibility, misrecognition, and the politics of representation through text-based and material installations.
The title of her lecture stems from a recurring personal experience: being mistaken for actress Whoopi Goldberg due to her locs hair. What may appear as a surface-level misidentification becomes, in Jackson’s work, a deeper study of what she terms hypervisibility, being highly seen in public space, yet simultaneously misread, erased, or reduced.
For Jackson, this tension led to the creation of her ongoing “Not Whoopi Project.” The project includes portrait-based works in which participants, often Black women with locs, hold signs that assert identity directly, challenging imposed narratives and reclaiming self-definition. Through this work, Jackson explores how visual assumptions shape social experience and identity formation.
She also reflected on earlier experiences that shaped her artistic practice. While living in San Francisco after graduating in 2016, Jackson recalled being repeatedly misidentified and dismissed in public spaces, at times labelled “homeless” despite presenting herself professionally. In another instance, she described being ignored in a grocery store line, as if she were not physically present. These moments of erasure, she explained, became foundational material for later works exploring invisibility and perception.
One such series, Languages of Invisibility, uses black felt boards with layered black-on-black text. The visual difficulty of reading the work mirrors the concept it addresses how Black presence can be simultaneously visible and unreadable within dominant cultural frameworks. Some text only emerges under light or shifts in angle, reinforcing the instability of recognition.
A major thread in Jackson’s lecture focused on family history and labor. She described a large-scale archival installation built from hundreds of hand-printed “timecards” documenting the life and labor of her grandmother. The work spans decades of domestic and emotional labor, translating everyday acts, cooking, cleaning, caregiving, church attendance, into an expansive visual archive.
By presenting these materials in museum and institutional spaces, Jackson interrogates what kinds of labor are valued and what forms of life are historically rendered invisible. The work also connects personal lineage to broader histories of Black women’s labor in America.
Jackson further expanded her discussion to include research-based installations addressing colonial economies, slavery, and material exchange systems. One project reference historical currency used in the transatlantic slave trade, reworked into large-scale text-based installations that map connections between language, capitalism, and historical violence.
Across her practice, Jackson repeatedly returns to questions of naming, value, and visibility. Her work refuses passive observation, instead demanding active reading, of history, of language, and of the self.
Ultimately, “Don’t Call Me Whoopi: My Art, My Agency” is more than a title, it is a declaration of self-definition, insisting on the right to be seen clearly, named accurately, and understood on one’s own terms.
In reflecting on emancipation, she offered a final through line:
“Freedom is not only historical or legal, it is also psychological and visual. It is the right to define oneself without distortion.
And in that sense, her title becomes its own declaration: Don’t call me who you think I am. I will name myself.
