HAGOOD: Lanecia Rouse and Ciona Rouse
The Curb Center’s galleries are open to the public Monday–Thursday, 10am–4pm, as well as Fridays and weekends by appointment, during exhibition dates. The galleries will be closed November 24–28, 2025, for Thanksgiving break.
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HAGOOD
“this past was waiting for me
when i came”
-Lucille Clifton
Hagood, South Carolina.
34° 03′ 15.60″ N. -80° 34′ 10.79″ W.
It’s where our maternal living memory begins. Great-Great-Grandmother Annie, who lived into our toddler years, called Hagood home. It’s where she took in her namesake and our Grandmother Annie Lee when she was still young and begged to leave Philadelphia to stay in Carolina with her grandmother. It’s where Annie Lee gave birth to our mother Connie. Hagood is a sort of home—even though it mostly exists for us in our infant memory
But there’s something about the South, something about being Black in the South, something about being Black and woman in the South that makes looking back a necessary way forward.
HAGOOD finds visual artist Lanecia Rouse collaborating with her sister and poet Ciona Rouse to explore their matrilineal line, in search of the softness and steel of the long line of women that carried them into the world. Through mixed media collage, installation, color meditations and poetry, the artists conjure up the world of their mothers, relying on passed-down stories and objects from the family archive, photographs, and the intentional practice of Toni Morrison’s concept of rememory—an act of re-experiencing inherited memories that are not your own. HAGOOD reflects the griefs, the artistry, the care and the resiliency that bind their family line and define their experience as Black women in the southern United States.
HAGOOD invites you to the land, to the home, and to the table the Rouse sisters have set. There, we encounter and contemplate the necessary quest into past connections that make us human today.