WVAC: Little Rock

In 1957, Little Rock, Arkansas, became a flashpoint in the American Civil Rights movement when nine African American students attempted to desegregate the all-white Central High School. Among them was fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford, whose solitary walk toward the school, met by a screaming white mob, was captured in one of the most enduring photographs of the twentieth century. Immaculately dressed and visibly composed, Elizabeth became an unwilling symbol of both courage and racial hatred, while the image of Hazel Bryan, her face contorted with abuse, came to embody the violence of resistance to integration.

Little Rock returns to that moment decades later, following Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan as they attempt to navigate a tentative relationship shaped by memory, guilt, and the long shadow of public history. As both women are drawn back into the spotlight, the work examines what reconciliation can mean when personal trauma has been frozen in a single image for generations. The piece interrogates the cost of notoriety, the limits of apology and the enduring consequences of racism, not as an abstract legacy, but as a lived and ongoing reckoning.