Panel Discussion: What Medicine Took- Black Medical Apartheid, Memory, and Repair
A free panel with Alfred Lacks Carter Jr., grandson of Henrietta Lacks, Elissa Blount Moorhead and V Walton on Black medical apartheid.
May 9 | 2:00 – 3:30 PM
Free Admission
What Medicine Took: Black Medical Apartheid, Memory, and Repair, a panel discussion with Alfred Lacks Carter Jr., grandson of Henrietta Lacks; Elissa Blount Moorhead; and V Walton. Presented as part of the Pharmaco/Liberation exhibition series curated by Juan T. Garcia, this conversation explored Black medical apartheid, medical experimentation, bodily autonomy, memory, and repair. Moving from the legacy of Henrietta Lacks and HeLa cells to Black healing archives and embodied artistic practice, the panel asked what medicine has taken from Black communities and what forms of care, accountability, and justice are necessary now.
Pharmaco/Liberation is a group exhibition examining healthcare through clinical materials like pills, implants, and diagnostic imaging. The show treats the body as a site of access, authority, and resistance. Henrietta Lacks' story lies at the heart of these questions: Who controls the body? Who profits from it? And what does justice look like when medicine fails to ask for consent?
About Alfred Lacks Carter Jr.
Alfred Lacks Carter Jr. is the grandson of Henrietta Lacks and the son of Henrietta's second daughter, Deborah Lacks. He is the Founder and President of the Henrietta Lacks House of Healing, a 501(c)(3) non-profit dedicated to providing transitional housing for men to combat homelessness and recidivism and support re-entry into the community after release. He also serves as Senior Advisor to HELA100: The Henrietta Lacks Initiative and is honored to serve as a World Health Organization Goodwill Ambassador for Cervical Cancer Elimination.
Alfred is highly active in his community, helping men transition back to their lives and families post-incarceration. He has presented in communities, organizations, and schools across the country, educating the world on the Lacks family story, his mother's journey, and his grandmother's legacy. His efforts include numerous social justice and health equity initiatives. Alfred also acted in and served as an advisor on the 2017 Emmy-nominated HBO film The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, in which Oprah Winfrey played his mother, Deborah Lacks. He is the author of the memoir Shadows of Immortality: Untold Struggles of Henrietta Lacks' Grandson.
About Henrietta Lacks
Henrietta Lacks was a vibrant wife, mother, and community leader who moved from Virginia to Baltimore's Turner Station. In 1951, at age 31, she died of cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Without her knowledge or consent, researchers took samples of her tumor and discovered the first immortal human cell line, named "HeLa." These cells doubled every 24 hours and could be reproduced indefinitely in laboratories. They have since been distributed worldwide, generating over 50,000 metric tons of HeLa cells and contributing to more than 75,000 studies, including the polio vaccine, HPV and HIV research, cancer treatments, and even space exploration. The Lacks family did not learn of this until 1975, twenty years after Henrietta's death, and has never received any of the revenues generated by her cells.
Henrietta Lacks' legacy is fundamental to modern bioethics policies and informed consent laws. In this panel, Alfred Lacks Carter Jr. will share his family's story and discuss medical ethics, patient rights, and the ongoing fight for healthcare justice.
About Elissa Blount Moorhead
Elissa Blount Moorhead is a Baltimore-based artist, filmmaker, writer, curator, producer, and cultural organizer whose work explores the poetics of Black everyday life, memory, self-determination, and collective care. Across film, installation, public art, design, and social practice, Moorhead has built a career around creating spaces for Black stories, Black interiority, and Black cultural memory to be held with complexity and depth. She is the founder and principal of Seven Stories, a production company creating film, television, and time-based installations, and her work has been acquired by the Baltimore Museum of Art.
Moorhead's work is especially relevant to this panel through Back and Song, a meditative four-channel film and art installation created with Bradford Young. The work reflects on health and wellness as part of the Black American experience from "cradle to grave," considering the labor, care, and resistance of generations of Black healers, including doctors, nurses, midwives, morticians, therapists, and health aides, within and against discriminatory Western medicine.
In this panel, Moorhead brings an artistic and archival lens to Black medical history, expanding the conversation beyond institutional harm to include Black traditions of healing, caregiving, ritual, memory, and survival. Her perspective helps ask how art can hold histories of medical violence while also foregrounding the forms of care Black communities have created in response.
About V Walton
V Walton is a Maryland-based interdisciplinary artist and educator whose sculpture, installation, and video work centers Black embodiment, ecology, disability, queerness, and the body. Working through clay, terra, natural materials, and corporeal form, Walton explores the wonder and complexity of Black identity while making layered connections between the body, nature, illness, and transformation. Their work often reflects on the social and interpersonal forces that shape, burden, and remake the body.
Walton holds an MFA in Ceramic Art from Alfred University and a BFA with a focus in ceramics from Towson University. Their work centers the narratives of women and gender-expansive people and draws from lived experiences of chronic illness-disability and queerness. Their practice has been exhibited locally and across the East Coast, including at Baltimore Clayworks, The Clay Studio in Philadelphia, and in connection with the Baltimore Museum of Art's Turn Again to the Earth Community Gallery.
In this panel, Walton brings a contemporary embodied and material perspective to the history of Black medical apartheid. Their work helps connect histories of medical extraction and objectification to present-day questions of chronic illness, disability justice, bodily autonomy, ecological repair, and the medical gaze. Walton's perspective asks how the Black body can be understood not only as a site of harm, but as an archive, a terrain, and a source of agency, relation, and transformation.
ADDITIONAL PROGRAMMING
Thursday, May 14 | 5:00–7:30 PM Bromo Artwalk Harm Reduction Training, hosted by Baltimore Harm Reduction Collition, Patien(t/ce), Performance by Jess Keyes
Friday, May 29 | 5:00–8:00 PM Closing Reception, Catalogue Available
We cannot wait to gather with you.
CONTACT
For inquiries, please contact Juan T. Garcia: pharmacoliberation@gmail.com
EVENT ACCESSIBILITY:
MSB is on the ground level, and the space is accessible by a ramp.
Bathrooms are wheelchair accessible and gender neutral
Masks encouraged
Photo Credit: Conrado Muluc
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