WOODLAWN — There was a point when Emmett Till was too painful a subject for artist Jean-Marcel St. Jacques.
“Emmett Till is the most famous story in the history of American civil rights, but especially for Black men, we don’t want to hear about that s**t,” the New Orleans-based sculptor and storyteller said. “We seen the picture. We know what happened. Anytime I’d hear that name, I’d get mad.”
But much like the hoodoo practice of “harming and healing” that inspires St. Jacques’ art, his latest work — a “quilt” made from pieces of Till’s family home in Woodlawn — takes the anger he and millions of Black people have felt over Till’s 1955 lynching and alchemizes it into a statement of beauty and triumph.
The large wooden quilt, completed days before the 69th anniversary of Till’s lynching, will be displayed at the future Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley House Museum, 6427 S. St. Lawrence Ave.
“This particular [artwork] is about overcoming that grief and focusing on the strength of his mother, his grandmother, who bought the house, and your people that came out here and bought property that became a foundation for folks to establish a Northern presence,” St. Jacques said.
The artwork can be a point of entry for Woodlawn residents, and youth in particular, to learn more about their community’s pivotal role in Black history, said Naomi Davis, founder and CEO of Blacks in Green.
The environmental nonprofit is restoring the Till family home into the museum, garden and theater which are set to open in 2026.
“We will be continuing to use [the quilt] as a teaching tool,” Davis said. “We’ll have all kinds of art pieces and collections in there, and the children will come … . They will learn and create rites of passage.”
An overhead view of the wooden quilt created by Jean-Marcel St. Jacques for the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley House Museum, using construction debris from the Till home’s renovation. Credit: Maxwell Evans/Block Club Chicago
Till, a 14-year-old Chicagoan killed by white supremacists in Mississippi, lived with his mother on the second floor of the St. Lawrence Avenue home. His uncle and cousins lived on the first floor.
Till visited a general store owned by Roy Bryant in Money, Mississippi, on Aug. 24, 1955. Bryant’s wife Carolyn Bryant accused Till of whistling at her. Days later, Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam kidnapped and tortured Till before shooting him in the head and throwing his body in the Tallahatchie River.
Till’s lynching, and Till-Mobley’s decision to show her son’s brutalized body at an open-casket funeral in Bronzeville, helped spark the Civil Rights Movement of the ’50s and ’60s.
The quilt made for the museum uses scrap wood and other debris from renovations at the Till family home, which Davis would not allow to be thrown away, she said.
Left: The Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley House, 6427 S. St. Lawrence Ave. in Chicago. Right: Emmett Till at 13, on Christmas Day 1954. Credit: Bob Chiarito/Block Club Chicago; Wikipedia
St. Jacques also plans to create 14 smaller quilts using the decades-old materials, which will be auctioned off to fund the Till museum’s development. The number reflects Till’s 14 years of life, St. Jacques said.
Working with pieces of the Till home was a spiritual experience, said Michelle Renee Perkins, an artist and associate art professor at Malcolm X College. She’s a friend of St. Jacques’ who collaborated with him on the quilt.
“The physical act of putting your hands in the dirt, and [feeling] the sawdust and dirt from this home, it’s — ” Perkins said, before being overcome with emotion.
Jean-Marcel St. Jacques, a New Orleans-based artist, sculptor and storyteller, puts the finishing touches on his latest work: A “wooden quilt” made of construction debris from the renovation of Emmett Till’s family home in Woodlawn. The piece will be displayed at a museum planned for the home. Credit: Maxwell Evans/Block Club Chicago
A Symbol Of Spirituality And Sustainability
Davis was introduced to St. Jacques’ work during a Blacks in Green staff retreat to New Orleans, when she visited the Calas Café near his home. She was immediately drawn to the work she saw on his porch, and even trespassed across his property to get a closer look, she said.
They arranged for a deeper conversation about the genesis of his practice, after which she bought three pieces for herself and began to consider commissioning a piece for the Till house museum, she said.
“I just knew the guy was a genius,” Davis said. “He told me the story of the wooden quilts and how the ancestor had come to him to inspire him … and it kind of made the [retreat] trip for me.”
As with many Black art forms, the wooden quilt’s origin story requires centuries of context.
“This practice I’m doing ain’t nothing new — I’ll blame it on the ancestors,” St. Jacques said. “It was just this particular way that it touched me.”
Nails feature prominently in the Till museum quilt — much like an nkisi nkondi, a traditional power figure created by priests and artists of the Kongo peoples of Africa.
An nganga, a mediator between the spirit and physical world, often places nails in an nkisi nkondi as part of a ritual to formalize agreements. The figure, and the spirits which inhabit it, could then be employed to settle disputes or punish those who break the agreement.
“It makes that nkisi an oath-taking instrument, something that represents the will and the wisdom of my ancestors,” St. Jacques said. “You know how you say, ‘I put that on my great-grandma?’ That’s what that nkisi is about.”
St. Jacques and Davis placed a final nail in the quilt together as they completed the piece last week.
Much like the practice of “speaking in tongues” from his Pentecostal and Baptist upbringing, the quilt is an extension of African traditions, St. Jacques said.
“You grow up with those connections to spirit, in whatever way that [ancestors] knew coming from [their] colonial indoctrination, but the Africa still peeks out,” he said. “A lot of things Black people do in America is very Kongo-based.”
Beyond spirituality, the quilts honor an ancestral history of sustainability in the form of recycling and upcycling.
St. Jacques’ great-grandfather, a migrant farmworker who had “all kinds of hustles on the side,” would travel to rich, white neighborhoods and “pick up all their cast-offs,” he said.
His great-grandmother would then help him take old clothes to the cotton mill or old newspapers to the paper mill to be recycled, while items like furniture could be used by the family, he said.
St. Jacques’ family is far from unique in that way, as Black people “come from a tradition of conservationists and we live that lifestyle,” Davis said.
“You could go to the ‘hood, look in somebody’s refrigerator and see how many times they used a Miracle Whip jar,” St. Jacques added.
Blacks in Green founder Naomi Davis holds the final nail in the wooden quilt created from scraps of Emmett Till’s family home, as Jean-Marcel St. Jacques hammers it in. Credit: Maxwell Evans/Block Club Chicago
It’s these spiritual and preservationist influences which led St. Jacques to start making his wooden quilts. A vision from his grandmother led him to buy a home in New Orleans’ Tremé neighborhood — one of the nation’s oldest historically Black neighborhoods — in 2004.
When Hurricane Katrina dismantled the home’s roof just a year later, a vision from his quiltmaking great-grandmother, Laura Agnew, called him to repurpose the debris into his first wooden quilt.
The damaged roof would supply the next decade’s worth of wood for the quilts, which were sold to restore the house, he said.
“Mother of necessity,” St. Jacques said. “My great grand-mama coming to me in that vision is what allowed me to make enough money to fix the house, by selling pieces of the house. It took care of itself.”
The wooden quilt practice was inspired by his immediate ancestors, to whom he maintains a shrine in his New Orleans home and workshop, but it’s also led St. Jacques to connect more deeply with ancestors — such as Till and Till-Mobley — whom he never met.
Another ancestor he’s connected with is José Antonio Aponte, a free Black Cuban sentenced to death in 1812 after being accused of leading a rebellion against slavery. St. Jacques reinterpreted Aponte’s revolutionary artwork to create “Portal for Aponte,” a piece for the exhibition “Visionary Aponte: Art and Black Freedom.”
During a scheduled artists’ talk around the exhibition in Havana, Afro-Cubans in attendance were so moved by learning of their “forgotten hero” that they began giving emotional speeches themselves, St. Jacques said.
“It wasn’t our artists’ talk no more,” he said. “They felt this Aponte moment was their moment to get up — it was almost like we opened the floodgates, so we just had to sit down and let the entire community vent.
“That’s just an example of how this [art] can function in a place that may not even be aware of the holy, sacred ground that they’re standing on.”
That’s a power Davis hopes South Siders will feel from St. Jacques’ work on the Till quilt, she said. Similarly, many Chicagoans may not know an unassuming Woodlawn two-flat was home for the Till family, who changed the course of U.S. history, she said.
They may not know Lorraine Hansberry‘s home, which is inspired her “A Raisin in the Sun,” is a half-mile away, nor that Muddy Waters, “the coolest dude in Chicago” according to St. Jacques, lived in nearby Kenwood.
The quilt and the Till house museum are steps toward reclaiming and continuing that history, St. Jacques and Davis said.
“We’re not acting like these are gods and goddesses that we need to elevate,” Davis said. “If we are not taught to enshrine our story, we’ll just keep getting ripped off.”
Maxwell Evans is the Hyde Park, Woodlawn and South Shore reporter at Block Club Chicago NFP
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