In a reflection on the work, Jazz writes, “We inhabit our histories. We feel the pains of the past, we clang in its echoes, feel its residue caked up on our skin. History’s traumas have been perpetually erected in monuments, embedded in street names, stone walled in woodlands, hung, stacked, and plastered in architecture. Not Never More is my gut reaction and visual response to confronting such an architecture—the problematic 19th century French wallpaper Les Vues d’Amérique du Nord (The Views of North America), created in 1834 by Jean-Julien Deltil.”

Jazz worked with a team to produce the large, screenprinted Not Never More tapestries. The team included Anna McNeary, Yolizbeth Lozano, Sage Matsushima, Katie Gui, Simon Slowinski, Lyza Baum, and Joel Orloff. The work was originally installed at the Nightingale-Brown House, and was on view from April to September 2022.

Early on in planning the installation, Jazz approached me about collaborating on a publication to contextualize the work. The exhibition guide includes a portion of the tremendous amount of archival research that went into making Not Never More and contextualized the ways in which Jazz wove archival materials into the imagery of the tapestries. The exhibiton guide that was accompanied by a folio of RISO printed reproductions of the tapesties with a numbered key printed on sheets of transparent vellum.