Stars Falling is a culture-centered artwork that casts a tender but critical gaze onto the things we love: role models, family members, places we call home, and beliefs about what is “good.” Anchored by “America’s favorite novel,” Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, this project considers our current moment through the lens of Lee’s writing.

In the novel, Atticus Finch is the central character who exemplifies a certain type of American “hero.” Near the end of Harper Lee’s life, her publisher dusted off an old manuscript that Lee wrote before Mockingbird. In this first-written but later-released novel, Go Set A Watchman, Lee revealed that Finch was a white supremacist. We readers —like his daughter, Scout — thought he stood for equality and justice. By contradicting and betraying the values he stood for, he has complicated our perspective on the world and the stories that help us make sense of it.

For the past few years, Todd Slaughter, Melissa Yes, and their collaborators have been discussing this with people in their Alabama and Ohio communities. Stars Falling brings these people and their words together in a dreamy constellation inspired by the backyards and front porches of the artists’ (and Harper Lee’s) Southern family homes. You are invited to sit, stay a while, and join the conversation.