While We Were Playing Checkers — Limited Edition Archival Print

While We Were Playing Checkers is reproduced from an original painting by Tuskegee-born artist and Taliaferro Union co-founder David Banks. Set just outside of Bray’s Barbershop in Tuskegee, Alabama, the work reflects on memory, place, and the institutions that once served as gathering spaces within Southern communities.

The title itself plays with the unreliability of memory. The figures sit around a chessboard, yet the work insists that they were playing checkers. A small contradiction that asks what happens to a story as time passes and the places that once held it begin to disappear.

While We Were Playing Checkers reflects on the preservation of rural Black institutions and the memories contained within them. Barbershops, schools, churches, businesses, and other gathering places have long served as informal archives of Black life, spaces where stories are exchanged, identities are shaped, and community history is carried forward from one generation to the next.

But memory is a fragile archive. Details shift. Stories are retold, embellished, misremembered, or lost altogether. And when the physical places that anchor those memories disappear, something more than a building is lost. The work considers our responsibility to preserve these places and their stories while there are still people who remember them, not simply as they were, but as they mattered.

Released in a strictly limited edition of 25 prints, each piece is individually hand signed and numbered by the artist.

Print Details

• 18 × 24 inches
• Archival giclée print
• Printed on archival fine art paper
• Signed by the artist
• Individually numbered
• Limited edition of 25
• Unframed

Once all 25 prints have been sold, this edition will not be reproduced.