Birmingham airport installation turns Alabama voices into film portrait

Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport is turning its terminal into a screen for Alabama identity, with a new installation of Whitman, Alabama set to greet travelers beginning Wednesday, July 1. The documentary project by filmmaker and artist Jennifer Zhang Crandall gathers short films built from Alabamians reading, reflecting and speaking about lived experience, turning the airport into a place where moving images and civic memory meet.

The installation arrives as America heads toward its 250th birthday, and it asks a direct question: who gets to represent the American story. Crandall’s project draws from Walt Whitman’s search for a voice expansive enough to hold many lives at once, and the airport presentation leans into that idea by framing Alabama as a collection of overlapping perspectives instead of a single, fixed image.

That approach fits BHM’s own arts program, which says the airport is meant to showcase the diverse values and cultures of the region. For many travelers, Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport is the front door to Alabama, and the setting gives Whitman, Alabama a different kind of audience than a theater or museum gallery. Thousands of people moving through security, gates and arrivals may encounter the work before they know anything about its structure or its ambitions.

The project itself has been developing for years. Its website says Crandall spent two years crisscrossing Alabama for the project, and earlier materials describe Whitman, Alabama as a 52-part documentary series and a single-channel video running 2 hours and 5 minutes. Crandall has described it as an experiment in documentary and poetry that aims to reveal the threads tying people together as individuals, as states and as a nation.

Crandall’s work has already moved through institutional spaces beyond Alabama. Smith College Museum of Art presented Jennifer Crandall: Whitman, Alabama from April 1 to July 17, 2022, and the University of North Carolina Hussman School of Journalism and Media hosted a screening and discussion featuring Crandall. Her website identifies her as the creator of the Emmy-nominated Whitman, Alabama portrait series, and project materials note that she was born in Africa and raised in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Haiti.

BHM’s latest art move also fits a pattern. The airport unveiled a mural honoring Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth in May 2024, and in April 2024 it said its Living Wall exhibit had been replanted and restored. With Whitman, Alabama, the terminal extends that civic gallery logic one step further, using documentary film to make Alabama visible in the ordinary flow of travel.