Years ago, Hamza Walker approached opera singer Davóne Tines to contribute to what would become “MONUMENTS,” the sweeping exhibition at The Brick and MOCA in Los Angeles that interrogates American identity through relics of its past. The pair’s ambling dialogue culminated in the short film HOMEGOING, a collaboration between Tines and filmmaker Julie Dash that commemorates the 10-year anniversary of the horrific shooting Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. To mark the film’s release, Tines sat down with Dash to discuss their shared roots in the South, the role of ritual in healing, and the exhibition that made it all possible.
“On the school bus in rural Virginia, we would drive through former Civil War battlefields, through gerrymandered architectures of socioeconomic divide, grand colonial farm estates (many were former plantations), and overgrown shacks my grandmother pointed out as our ancestors’ slave cabins. My work as a singer and creator became tethered to the need to unknit and understand those complex landscapes. When Hamza Walker approached me to make something for ‘MONUMENTS,’ I felt a deep need to participate.
Our conversation lasted three years. Hamza eventually guided me to memorialize the impetus for the Confederate monuments coming down, and the impetus for the exhibition: the anti-Black mass shooting and hate crime that occurred on June 17, 2015 at Mother Emanuel AME Church, killing nine congregants during an evening Bible study.
I didn’t have a relationship to the church, so Hamza, a small team, and I visited to start building a relationship with its pastor, administration, and the space itself. We went on a sweltering tour through Charleston’s haunted streets. Our tour guide attempted to walk the tightrope of opposing perspectives on secrets-in-plain-sight: wedding cake–like Victorian seaside mansions belying the torment of the auction block a few streets away. After that, I decided to sleep through the next morning’s tour of the old slave market. Lol.
We visited the church in the early evening. A congregant let us in through a side door that led to the stage-right side of the sanctuary near the pulpit. Compared to the church I grew up in, this one was massive: a two-story sanctuary of warm, dark woods with a wraparound balcony and richly detailed stained glass windows in monumental filigree.
I wandered off into the cavernous sanctuary lit by the sunset pouring through the ample glass. The 1891 floorboards creaked musically as I walked to the center of the red velvet pews. When I sat, a familiar scent of old wood, fabric, humid air, and hymnal pages took me to my home church, Providence Baptist in Orlean, Virginia. Our floors sang the same way; the same scents wafted, but the feeling was different. I knew what had taken place here, and that heaviness pulled me down into the pew, knitting feelings of physical vulnerability and fear together with a space where I never expected to feel those things—the church, an epicenter of Black community. It revealed that pain and threat move through the same networks as connection.
We invited Julie Dash to make a film based on the song ‘Let It Shine,’ made with my band the Truth, to offer hope and healing in this sacred building. During the shoot, Julie opened the door to her Charleston.”
—DAVÓNE TINES
Davóne Tines: When did you start coming down here?
Julie Dash: I was born and raised in New York. My father’s side of the family, the Dashes and the Capers, were in Charleston since the 1700s. So we used to drive down, and our first stop, before we even got to my grandmother’s house, would be the Humane and Friendly Society Cemetery. In our family, we clean the graves of our ancestors. As a child, I didn’t know what was going on. As a teenager, I was totally embarrassed. Like, “My friends can’t know about this.”
Tines: In rural Northern Virginia, we had an annual day for the graveyards. There was a church brunch and then you’d go to the family graveyard. What did you think of Charleston as a New York child?
Dash: It was a culture shock. I was so confused by the Charleston houses with front doors on the side that led to another front door. My grandmother explained that they were built before air conditioning, so buildings faced the ocean or the Cooper River to let the afternoon breeze cool the houses down. In the South, they keep the shades down and everything dark in the summer to keep the house as cool as possible.
Tines: Did you like it?
Dash: Let’s say that I grew to love it. At first, I was confused by the Gullah Geechee culture—everyone had a Gullah Geechee accent. My grandmother used to say, “Don’t let anyone call you a Geechee, but be very proud that you are.”
Tines: When did you come to realize what that culture meant?
Dash: When I was at UCLA, I did an independent study. I came to understand that Africans brought to the New World didn’t speak the same language, and they didn’t have the same traditions. On the mainland, there was a great creolization of African ethnicities that mixed with New World realities, assimilating into a culture that was also European and Native American. But Gullah Geechees were insulated from African American mainland culture. Charleston’s also a port city. There was a lot of Asian influence, Portuguese influence, Scotch-Irish, and French Huguenot. It’s very different from, say, Alabama or Mississippi.
Tines: It seems like people are still in dialogue with an older lifestyle across the cultural spectrum here.
Dash: The old South lives side by side with the new South in many ways. One of our crew members, Ernest Parks, does historical reenactments—they have a whole platoon of Black soldiers who do Civil War ones. Coming from New York, it’s just like, “What?”
Tines: How did Hamza approach you about the project we’re making right now?
Dash: Actually, AJ told me to call him. I did, and he told me about the project: the monuments that had been relieved of their presence in the South, and the film of you singing opera inside Mother Emanuel Church. To be able to pay homage to the people who lost their lives in that space just next door to where we’re sitting now, and the removal of these Confederate monuments that are offensive to us as a people, that’s an “aha” moment.
Tines: Some monuments were taken from Charleston as well.
Dash: People were confused about that. Many of those statues were erected in the 1920s. They’re not Civil War relics; there’s nothing “authentic” about them. So I think these changes are a good thing. I think it’s part of the healing process—as is this particular project, working with you.
Tines: Does Charleston feel like a home to you now?
Dash: It does in many ways.
“MONUMENTS” opens at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA—co-organized and co-presented by the Brick—on Oct. 23 and will be open to the public through May 3, 2026.
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