Stolen Childhoods Exhibit Reveals Painful Stories Of Victims Of Sexual Violence
What can you say when a child is murdered?
When beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey is strangled in her Colorado home? When Rachel Carver disappears on the last day of school in Spokane?
What artist Sharon Tetly says fills the Chase Gallery at City Hall, covers the walls, and packs urns and boxes with terrible force.
Tetly cannot say exactly what happened to Rachel or JonBenet, but she tells what happened to her when the adults in her life hurt her and her sisters.
Her stories, pounded on lead scrolls, wrapped in wire, dusted with red dirt, appear amid family treasures in “The Power of the Past: Untold Stories.” The show continues through Friday.
The exhibit on sexual violence against children is both highly personal and highly reflective of headlines today.
“There’s so much content, it’s so deep that I’ve had laypeople who walk through this gallery all the time say, ‘It was the most interesting exhibit I’ve ever seen here,”’ said Ralph Busch, outreach coordinator for the Spokane Arts Commission.
Visitors should know this: It’s all true.
The baby shoes so soft and tiny are her brother Bobby’s shoes, worn months before he was accidently run over. The story of how he died is revealed on a scroll above the shoes. Tetly saw her brother die from her front porch when she was 7.
Tetly is a private person. She’s in her 40s, and won’t say where in the Midwest she grew up. She asks her husband, Craig Bailey, if he minds being identified in the newspaper.
An art instructor at Washington State University and the University of Idaho who lives in Spokane, Tetly says showing Untold Stories “felt like I was standing there naked.
“What I’m trying to do is not preach and tell people what to think, it’s to get them to feel until they want to change something themselves,” she said.
At first glance, the exhibit has a contemporary feel that quickly reveals something different.
“It’s full of surprises,” said Busch. “You just don’t expect what you’re getting into. It unfolds and it’s almost shocking.”
Each item of the highly technical exhibit has been treated to look as though it was transported from America’s rural past. The sound of a child’s musical rocking chair - Tetly’s chair - is piped in overhead.
Her dad’s chaps rest in a dusty dynamite box. On the wall, cottonwood branches are woven into a shield. A shield that might have protected her from her grandfather.
Books, dolls and jewelry are “silent witnesses who authenticate the experience,” the artist said. The scrolls are made of lead - a toxic substance -“because these experience can be very toxic for people.” Strings and yarn bind every item with pain.
“Part of letting go of things is knowing the reality of them,” said Tetly.
Three open scrolls tell what happened to her and her sisters as children. All survived.
Closed scrolls honor children who didn’t.
JonBenet Ramsey’s scroll is dusted like her life was, with gold. The 6-year-old girl died the week Tetly was preparing the exhibit.
Rachel Carver, murdered about the time Tetly moved to Spokane, helped inspire the show. Clipping newspaper accounts, the artist felt overwhelming helpless. A closed scroll made of those clippings is now displayed next to Tetly’s own scroll, “sort of under my protection.”
“It’s very powerful,” said Marcia Gallucci, advocate coordinator of the Spokane Sexual Assault Center. “I hope this will inspire people to really listen when kids tell. It can be a lifetime of pain.”
Tetly said in an age of violent TV shows and movies, she wanted to create a place where people can feel the pain that real victims feel.
A security guard at City Hall keeps going back to the Chase Gallery. He told Tetly he liked the show, then he hated it, and now he doesn’t know what to think.
“It made me sick,” one viewer wrote in a comments book. “Your testimonial is heartbreaking but needed to be told,” wrote another.
What can you say about a child’s murder? Tetly shakes her head, speechless. All around her, the exhibit screams.
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo