Soulsista is a creation of Marilyn Nance, a photographer/storyteller/new-media artist known for her work on African-American spiritual expressions.

Nance has received two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships (one in photography and another in non-fiction literature) and has been an artist-in-residence at Light Work and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Her photographs have been published in The Black Photographers Annual, the New York Times, Life, and A History of Women in Photography; they are in the collection of the National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

Artist's Statement

I developed the "Shine on the Titanic" website before Titanic the movie was released. I was in a graduate design class at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, and each person in the class was assigned to produce a project around someone who had sailed on the Titanic.

I could not wrap my mind and energies around any one of those rich folks and searched for information on someone who had sailed not in the palatial upper levels of the Titanic but in the bottom of the ship.

As you know, very little documentation exists on the lives of ordinary folks. I was stuck.

I was in the shower getting ready to go to class -- empty-handed -- when I get this message, "Shine on the Titanic" ... Yeah, there was this story about a brother who was on the Titanic ... I initiated a search for everything that had anything to do with Shine.

All of my projects are like containers; everything in my life has a way of falling into them. It just so happens that while working on the Titanic project, I was reading Race Traitor, and Patricia's line "Whiteness is a death trip" from "Manifesto of a Dead Daughter" hit me: The Titanic was like the great white hope and it literally was a death trip for many. I was glad that Patricia wrote what she did, because I could not have gotten away with saying it.

The Titanic was symbolic of whiteness, and everything that undid the Titanic was represented in the telling of the story as being black.

Parallel universe: black folks create a story of black survival and triumph in face of impossible adversity in the folk poem "Shine on the Titanic." A lowly worker in the hellhole of the great ship affirms the value of life over riches, escapes the sinking ship, and swims on home.

There were no black folks on the Titanic.