The artist team has executed and curated multimedia installations that exhibited globally in Beijing,[1] Tokyo,[2] Luxembourg,[3] and nationally in Washington, D.C.,[4] Atlanta,[5] Seattle,[6][7] and New York City,[8] among others.
[9] McCallum + Tarry's first collaborative work was Witness: Perspectives on Police Violence, which was inspired by the Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo cases in 1997 in New York City.
[11][12][13] In 2008, they returned to creating large-scale artwork addressing racial histories, most notably in the projects Evidence of Things Not Seen, Within Our Gates, Wade in the Water, and the Whitewash painting series.
Perhaps one of McCallum + Tarry's most well-known projects, Evidence of Things Not Seen, uses 104 painted portraits of protesters who were arrested during the January 1956 Montgomery bus boycott to conceptually re-examine the history of the Civil Rights Movement.
[14] McCallum and Tarry constructed each portrait with two layers: an oil painting on linen overlaid by a photographic image printed on sheer silk, both based on the original police "mugshots" of each protester.
Building on the archival research they had undertaken for Evidence of Things Not Seen,[5] the artist team converted the tower, which had once been used to supply water to a neighboring cotton mill.
The video used time-lapse photography to compress an hour of real time to five minutes, incorporating audio testimonials of the youth to capture their theoretical invisibility as cars and people zoom around them.