A partial history of Birmingham, Alabama though Miriam’s art series continued… In the 1920s, some middle and upper-class families in Birmingham wanted to leave the polluted, crowded, and somewhat raucous city for a country life (or what would become known as “suburban”).
Established Birmingham residents thought they were crazy, nevertheless, small villages like English Village, Crestline, and Mountain Brook were created “over the mountain” and featured their own schools, stores, nature preserves, country clubs, government, and eventually the nation’s first suburban “office park” (which Miriam’s uncle played a key part in developing).
Unfortunately, a gradual but significant migration of the city’s white, wealthy population and (later) businesses to outer, independently governed and taxed village districts would have a profoundly negative economic and social impact on the less wealthy and minority steel and domestic workers left in the city. At least one of these new over-the-mountain communities explicitly restricted Black Americans from owning or building in their homeowner association charter.
Miriam’s family was one of the first to build and settle in one of these communities called Mountain Brook and thus much of her art centers around this area–the villages, Canterbury Road, the parks, etc. At the same time, her parents and much of Miriam’s early social life were still connected to a vibrant Birmingham, which informs her art about now-forgotten people and places downtown. These pieces depict life in three of the over-the-mountain villages through the decades.