Artists also explore the places where it happened--places that are rich with historical significance where real people lived in and played out the monumental social, cultural and political issues of their times. The practice of examining and reinterpreting the past became mainstream around 1990. It was then that many artists became creative historians who unearthed the human side of history. Their work often was in response to the places where history happened. Indeed, the work derived its power and meaning from the place in which it was located.   

The Places with a Past exhibit (1991) at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina, a ground-breaking assembly of site-specific installations that reanimated history, was the first major show of this kind of art. 29 artists created environments in different locations around the city that, while evoking the life and times of the old South, led the way for the historic research-based site-specific art that followed.

Ann Hamilton’s Indigo Blue was one of the seminal works in A Place with a Past. It consisted of 18,000 blue work shirts neatly stacked in a heap, much like a mass grave. Next to the pile, a live person sat calmly erasing history books. The place was an old garage. The installation addressed the indigo industry, which thrived at one time in the south, while it honored the anonymous workers whose names never made it into the history books. Indeed, their stories have been erased by the passage of time.

Marthagarzon.com (contemporary art)