Roscoe Hall

Norris and Weems (Two of the Alabama Nine/Scottsboro Boys), 2022

Ingredients: Acrylic, denim, clay, ink, coffee filters, pastel, graphite, cotton, indica, german beers, breakup cookie and love on canvas

Thoughts: A reconstruction. Clarence Norris and Charles Weems, two of the Scottsboro Nine, have long been trapped in history as victims of injustice, but here, they are reassembled with presence, movement, and defiance. Through torn t-shirts, coffee filters, paper towels, denim, charcoal, and turmeric, their story is no longer just archival—it is tangible, layered, and sculptural.

The worn and distressed cotton T-shirts mirror the ways their identities were stripped and remade within the prison system—labor, uniforms, and erasure. Denim, a working-class staple, connects them to the physical toil of incarceration but also to resilience. Turmeric, a natural healer, bleeds through the textures like both a wound and its own antidote, marking time, pain, and perseverance. Their postures suggest motion, an unwritten movement toward autonomy despite the iron bars that surround them.

Rather than depicting Norris and Weems as mere subjects of injustice, this piece reframes them as active agents within a broken system—hustlers, fighters, and extroverts who learned how to navigate the structures meant to erase them. The materials do more than build a visual; they rewrite the narrative, turning these men into something larger than their trial, something textured, layered, and unfinished because the fight for justice never really ends.

48”x60”

$10,500