On March 13, 2020, Ju’Niyah Palmer found out her sister Breonna had been shot and killed by Louisville police. She took to Instagram to publicly grieve and received a barrage of death threats. She felt she had no safe space, no sanctuary in which she and her community could heal.
Two years later, Breonna’s Garden XR Exhibition aims to provide just that, and the exhibition is coming to Louisville this weekend just in time for what would have been Taylor’s 29th birthday on Sunday.
The exhibition, which the Roots 101 African American Museum will host for one month, was created and produced by Web3 artist Lady Phøenix in collaboration with Taylor’s family. After traveling across the country and earning widespread acclaim, including the Best Societal Impact Award at the Augmented World Expo, the free exhibit is finally arriving in the city this weekend.
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The arrival will be commemorated by the Breewayy Brunch and Day Party held at Whisky Dry Restaurant, 412 S. Fourth St., from 12 to 6 p.m. Sunday, and Breonna’s sister Ju’Niyah Palmer, mother Tamika Palmer and boyfriend Kenneth Walker will be there. It also can be experienced at Roots 101, 124 N. First St., on Saturday and through the end of the month after Sunday. Its hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.
Here are three key highlights of the exhibit:
The Breonna Taylor exhibition uses groundbreaking technology
Visitors will find an encompassing augmented reality garden, as well as a virtual reality experience that includes advanced holograms of Breonna Taylor and her loved ones. Working in collaboration with Webby-award wining artist Sutu (aka Stuart Campbell), the exhibit has created first-of-its-kind volumetric capture technology that anyone can take part in.
Phøenix said she was particularly drawn to this technology because it allows her to bring what she calls “tech equity” to the community. Though AR and VR are not new technology, they have yet to become widely accessible, especially among low-income and marginalized communities.
For that reason, her team has also developed an app, also called Breonna’s Garden and available free on the App Store, so people can carry these experiences with them in their own pockets and homes.
“With augmented reality, I wanted to bring forward hidden truths, hidden realities, and allow people to to expose those realities on to their everyday world,” Phøenix said.
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It presents Breonna Taylor’s life beyond the shooting
Both Ju’Niyah and Phøenix said the exhibition is an opportunity to come face to face with Breonna’s humanity in a way that has not been given to the public previously. They said it is a way for her to not be reduced to just another number among the nearly 1,000 people estimated to be killed by police in this country every year.
And for Ju’Niyah, Breonna’s Garden is about the truth. People don’t know how she started working to take care of her grandmother at the age of 7, Ju’Niyah said. People don’t know that Taylor, an ER technician, was awarded a posthumous nursing degree from Spalding University. Ju’Niyah said she wants people to come to the exhibition to hear more facts like these, not just the ones surrounding her death.
“I’m going to do anything I need to do until people realize that she was human,” she said.
Phøenix acknowledged this exhibition may not appeal to everyone. But she also said that in the face of grief, people should come together.
“You don’t change people’s minds,” Phøenix said. “People change their own mind. It’s like you hold one glass of clean water and one glass of dirty water. You tell them this is clean water, I’m offering you clean water, I’m offering you something good. You can drink from this water, it’s safe. But they have to make up their own mind.”
It gives visitors a chance to grieve
Ju’Niyah Palmer told The Courier Journal the VR experience includes a moment at the end in which participants will have the opportunity to either send a message to her sister, or to someone in their own life they have lost. Having watched people enter this garden, this new world in which people can be presented with loving memories in order to find solidarity for their grief, as it has traveled the country, Phøenix said she has watched many a grown man leave the exhibition in tears.
Going forward, Phøenix said she hopes to expand the garden project to collaborate with hospitals, citing a desire to alleviate people from the hostile environment of the cold, loud, harshly lit rooms in which many families have dealt with tragedy.
But above all, she hopes people will be able to connect with the truth of who Taylor was, and understand what her life as an ER technician and nurse was all about.
“I think people will really feel thankful the garden exists,” she said. “Because for a moment, their grief is suspended and they’re held together in a space with other people. And Breonna is someone who made it her life’s purpose to hold that space.”
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Reach reporter Thomas Birmingham @CBirmingham@gannett.com and follow him on Twitter @cthomasbirm.
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