Not Your Vacation Home
Collage, 4x6 and 8x10
2020
Not Your Vacation Home is a mixed media collage series exploring land, lineage, memory, and Indigenous presence through archival family photographs and tourist postcard imagery. Layering images of ancestors and tribal members with idealized depictions of Martha’s Vineyard, the series confronts the tension between lived Indigenous histories and the commodified image of the island as a vacation destination.
Working within the scale and format of postcards, the collages reflect on the ways places are packaged for consumption while deeper histories become obscured, romanticized, or erased. One collage centers my grandmother within a tree connecting multiple generations of family, positioning lineage and land as inseparable. Throughout the series, family photographs become vessels for cultural memory, continuity, and survival.
The work questions who gets remembered within landscapes often associated with leisure, wealth, and escape while foregrounding the ongoing presence of Wampanoag life and relationships to place. By reclaiming the visual language of postcards and tourism imagery, the series interrupts narratives that flatten the island into destination alone, insisting instead on layered histories, ancestral connection, and Indigenous continuity across generations.