Between River and Grid: a Southern Inheritance by Nell Gottlieb
Nell Gottlieb confronts her Alabama roots and her family’s legacy of both enslavement and Indigenous displacement. Along the Coosa and Tallapoosa Rivers, she traces how a Muscogee homeland was transformed into plantation agriculture and later into an industrial watershed. These changes reveal how systems of land control, labor extraction, and cultural memory reshaped both the landscape and the inheritance of those who live within it today. Through archival research, family history, and material-based visual art, Gottlieb comes to see how these histories are entangled in the land itself and in her own relationship to place. The book asks what repair might require when one inherits both attachment to a landscape and responsibility for the violence that made that attachment possible.
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