A Second Life: Rest in Peace T-shirts, Black Portraiture, and Archiving

R.I.P. T-shirts are popular mourning objects in Black working-class communities and often include an image of the deceased person accompanied by text that might include a scripture, nickname, a birthdate, and death date. Many people purchase R.I.P. T-shirts in the wake of a loved one’s death to display their proximity to the person. Combining textile and photography, those who commission these shirts collaborate with the makers to invoke their loved one’s presence and maintain the memory of their legacy within and beyond their respective communities.

In this paper, I situate R.I.P. T-shirts in critical histories and theories on death, mourning and archiving that are imbricated across Black Studies, Art History, Performance Studies, and Fashion Studies. I analyze R.I.P. T-shirts within the canon of art historical scholarship on Black portraiture, querying how the field of Art History might be expanded to account for the ways these shirts engage similar aesthetic processes, politics, and performances. Furthermore, I draw on theoretical concepts of archiving to assess how the making and wearing of R.I.P. T-shirts might be read as a communal archival practice, specifically one that counters a contemporary archive of widely-circulated images of antiblack violence and death. Methodologically, I explore these inquiries through visual analyses of R.I.P. T-shirts at T-shirt shops in Chicago, artworks that depict R.I.P. T-shirts, popular media articles that quote people across the U.S. discussing the role of R.I.P. T-shirts in their lives and communities, as well as interviews that I conduct in Chicago with the makers and customers of these shirts. This paper presentation draws from a chapter in my forthcoming dissertation titled “In Loving Memory: Black Performance and the Sartorial Politics of Mourning,” which explores how Black people in the United States, Ghana and Jamaica perform mourning using a variety of aesthetic practices that foreground the sartorial.