Steve Prince, The Block: Memory, Community, and the Work of Preservation
“And I think that’s power, and I think that’s so powerful for us in what we do as curators of art, as makers of art, as collectors of art, as showcases of art, all these ways in which we interact and engage art. I think these elements are just so important because in essence, what you and I are doing is preserving history. We’re preserving something that’s going to outlast both of us that gets passed on to someone else.”
Steve Prince, 2025
Steve Prince’s The Block begins with Greenville, North Carolina, but the work quickly moves beyond the history of a single place. Within its expansive composition, Prince brings together community history, family memory, agricultural labor, healthcare, music, domestic life, mourning, birth, spirituality and storytelling. These histories do not appear as separate episodes. They accumulate within the same visual field, much as memory itself accumulates across generations.
Created during Created during a residency at East Carolina University in 2024, The Block is a monumental work measuring approximately two by seven feet. Prince describes it as drawing partly upon histories surrounding Greenville’s Black community and East Carolina University-histories that, for him, resonate with the experiences of Black communities across the United States that created spaces of resilience, care and community within conditions of restriction.
Prince does not approach that history as an illustrator. Instead, The Block becomes a point of departure for thinking about how communities remember themselves, how histories survive outside traditional institutions, and how individual experience becomes intertwined with a larger cultural inheritance.
This conversation was recorded by Matney Gallery in 2025 and is presented here with a new introduction and expanded context. It offers Prince’s own account of how particular histories, people, places and symbols entered the making of The Block, while also revealing connections to a broader body of work concerned with memory, communal life and the transmission of history.
Hi, this is Lee Matney of Matney Gallery. I’m here with Steve Prince, Distinguished Artist in Residence and Director of Engagement at the Muscarelle Museum of Art. Hi Steve. What’s new in your practice?
Steve Prince: I have several different things going on. One of the last pieces I created was over at East Carolina University, a piece called The Block. It’s a pretty epic vinyl cut, measuring two feet by seven feet. I partly based it on the history that circulates around the Black community in Greenville, North Carolina, as well as around East Carolina University.
Interestingly enough, the history I referenced in the piece, for lack of a better word, exposes itself. It’s a story you’ll find in many communities across the United States, Black communities that were thriving within spaces of constriction, where they weren’t allowed to thrive in terms of access outside of their own space. But they still found a way, made a way out of no way, within the context of their own communities.
And I find myself making work about that over and over again. I think what happens is that I begin to reflect upon my parents and their struggle, and I reflect upon my father. My father had artistic acumen, but it was a dream deferred, something he was unable to accomplish because of the times he grew up in and the constraints of those times.
But my parents, of course, worked very hard and created space for me to do what I do. It is only fitting that I pay homage to those who did so much to create a space for me to do something that they were denied. So when I make The Block, I’m reflecting not only upon the community I descend from, but also upon the community that I was reared in.
Steve Prince: In that image, I pay homage to a woman named Laydonna Wright. Laydonna Wright was an advocate for African Americans’ healthcare concerns. Then there was another woman named Francis Hopkins, who did something very similar to what Blaine Blayton did here in Williamsburg.
Black people weren’t allowed to access different hospital spaces, so instead of complaining about the situation, they created their own. Blaine Blayton in Williamsburg created a hospital for Black people, and Francis Hopkins turned her house into a hospital. She was a nurse, and she wanted to ensure that people received proper medical care and didn’t die from treatable conditions, allowing them to live longer, healthier lives.
Steve Prince: In that same composition, I have a character I’ve been incorporating into several pieces now, my Grio character, which is my storytelling figure.
This person is timeless. She’s the past, the present and the imagined future. I’ve used her three times recently. First, I used her in The Block, then in a piece called Peace Quilt, which is the mural here in Williamsburg that we discussed in the podcast on your site. I also used her in a piece called Peace Table, which is part of an exhibition at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum at the University of Oregon.
This woman recurs over and over again, and in the piece I did for East Carolina, she’s holding a Sankofa staff in her hand. The Sankofa is a mythical bird from Ghana, Africa, that moves forward while looking back.
Inside that image, there is also an homage to the corn, the tobacco, the cotton and the sugarcane, and those different crops that those bodies were subservient to, building industries that are still living in this nation and that were made upon their backs. They’re almost like sedimentary rock or sedimentary soil that has been built upon their bodies.
Also in that image, I show the everyday. There is a woman braiding the hair of her loved one, a couple dancing on the street with a boombox going, which alludes to the 1980s and the burgeoning of hip hop and a lot of those musical forms coming out of New York, California and Chicago. Hip hop has now spread globally. Also in that image is a guy grilling, just making some food and flipping some burgers and some dogs.
Steve Prince: Those things that we know of in the everyday, that even in the midst of our pain and our struggle, we still find places of respite, and that’s in there.
And then I end that piece with a couple of really heavy concepts or constructs. One, there is a funerary march that’s happening inside the composition. In that dirge, a person is being carried on into the afterlife, but walking right beside it is a mother with a child. She’s also pregnant. So as that life leaves, another life is coming in its place.
And I think that bespeaks those kinds of things, those generations. It bespeaks the idea of Sankofa, to get us to remember to remember as we go forward. And then there’s a house in the background.
Steve Prince: Because one key thing, Lee, is that when I was traveling from Williamsburg to East Carolina, going to Greenville to do this work, I passed through Edenton, North Carolina. And not many people know the history circulating around Edenton, North Carolina.
There was a woman by the name of Harriet Jacobs who wrote under the pen name Linda Brent, and she wrote a book called Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. In that book, she basically talks about escaping from the overtures, the sexual overtures of her slave master, by hiding in the attic space of her grandmother’s house for seven years.
That’s extraordinary, the lengths that this woman goes through to hide away from this terrorism that’s happening to her body. And the only reason why she did that, she didn’t flee. It’s not that she couldn’t. She didn’t because, just as many other women did, she had two children that she wanted to stay near, and she did not want to leave her kids behind.
So these extraordinary stories that are embedded within the fabric of our nation, that shape us, I think it is so important as artists to be able to tell them and to share these stories, to be truth sayers.
And it ties right back to the other piece I told you about called Peace Table, which is about 42 inches in diameter. In that piece that I created, I literally carved the table, carved out the message there. So when everyone who comes to that table touches it, they are reminded of that history, and all of that gets embedded within that space. The table becomes a silent participant.
And all of that happens in the context of the sacred space of a kitchen, and then the mural.
Steve Prince: I love doing that piece here in Williamsburg as an extension of what I do as an artist, along with the galleries and museum spaces that you and I work in. But the mural is in this public space, and it’s not meant to be there forever. And I love that. I love the temporality of it because, in essence, the mural is just like us. It’s like a living, breathing entity that is out in the public to consume, but over time it will wither away. So it’s here for a little while.
And I love the fact that, through this kind of medium, we get to keep at least a memory of it alive. We have photographic references of it, and then there’s just going to be a small sector of people who actually saw it.
And I think that’s power, and I think that’s so powerful for us in what we do as curators of art, as makers of art, as collectors of art, as showcases of art, all these ways in which we interact and engage art. I think these elements are just so important because, in essence, what you and I are doing is preserving history. We’re preserving something that’s going to outlast both of us, that gets passed on to someone else.
And I love the significance of this moment, that we are sitting here together talking and engaging. This is important. We are living, breathing, we both have all of our faculties, and we are able to talk about this work.
Prince’s closing reflection returns the conversation to a question that extends beyond The Block itself: what happens to history once it has been given form. His view of artists, curators, collectors and those who present art as participants in preservation places the artwork within a longer continuum of memory and transmission. The Block gathers histories that might otherwise remain dispersed across families, communities, archives and places, while the conversation surrounding the work becomes another part of that record. In this sense, preservation is not simply about holding onto the past, but about creating the conditions through which it can continue to be encountered, interpreted and carried forward.
