Lin Lu Curates the Mayflower Church’s Third-Anniversary Historical Photo Exhibition, Bringing Scattered Memories Into Public View
MIDLAND, Texas — On March 22, inside the farm activity center where the Mayflower Church community now gathers, dozens of historical photographs, enlarged to 16 by 20 inches, lay spread across a long table.
Adults, holding black pens, leaned over the photographs, searching for the right place to write their names. Children stood nearby, watching at first, then stepped forward to write carefully along the white borders. Some recognized familiar faces immediately. Others paused before a photograph, as if waiting for memory to rise again before gently putting pen to paper.
It was a quiet moment, but one marked by the weight of history.
As one handwritten name after another appeared, the photographs ceased to be mere records of the past. They became testimony.
A Curator’s Vision
That scene unfolded at the center of the Mayflower Church Third-Anniversary Historical Retrospective Photo Exhibition, curated by Lin Lu—a painter, writer, oral history interviewer, and author of Contemporary Mayflower Pilgrimage. Originally invited to speak at the anniversary celebration and help produce a commemorative video, Lin Lu gradually transformed that invitation into something larger and more enduring: an act of public memory shaped by trust, labor, and a deep sense of calling.
Lin Lu did not enter this work as someone casually looking for a subject. Her relationship with the Mayflower Church community had already been formed through years of attention and accompaniment. She had followed their situation, cared about their journey, listened to their stories, and helped make their voices heard. The trust that made this exhibition possible was not created for a single event. It had been built over time.
That trust mattered.
Memory, Trust, and Public Witness
In a story shaped by displacement, waiting, survival, faith, and resettlement, trust is not incidental. It is foundational. The Mayflower community would not lightly place its history in the hands of someone who did not understand its weight.
Lin Lu found herself asking a simple but decisive question: Was a one-day gathering and a brief appearance enough? Rather than simply fly to Midland and stay for the day’s events, she wanted to help shape the anniversary into something that could remain—something that could continue speaking after the event itself had ended, and something that could bring the community’s history into public view. An exhibition gives memory a place to stand. It allows people to return to it. It also offers those outside the community—those who were not originally part of this story—a way to enter it.
Remote Coordination and Cooperation
Lin Lu’s decision arose from what she describes as an inner prompting, a calling to witness. She chose to take on the curatorial work under intense time pressure. Only one month remained before the event. Under ordinary circumstances, that might have seemed far too short. Lin Lu was in Pennsylvania while the exhibition was being prepared in Texas.
Yet under contemporary conditions, the work moved forward in an orderly way across state lines—through screens, online orders, repeated revisions, shipping arrangements, instant communication, and continual coordination. Design could be completed remotely. Captions could be drafted and edited online. Materials could be ordered and shipped. Decisions about layout and content could move back and forth quickly.
What truly sustained the project, however, was cooperation.
The Mayflower coworkers in Midland provided indispensable help on the ground, carrying out the practical tasks a remote curator could never complete from a computer alone: receiving materials, preparing the space, installing the work, coordinating the signing, and photographing the process. Step by step, what began as a call through vision became something clear, visible, and tangible.
Gathering Scattered Memories
What Lin Lu was really doing was gathering back together what had once been scattered.
The Mayflower Church’s journey is not a single event but a chain of connected experiences: departure, exile, waiting, labor, prayer, uncertainty, endurance, arrival, and rebuilding. The photographs preserved fragments of that history, but fragments alone are not yet shared memory. Unless someone helps them speak to one another, they remain scattered pieces.
This is where Lin Lu’s particular combination of gifts became essential.
She is not only a writer and interviewer, but also a visual artist. She understands sequence, spacing, emotional temperature, and the subtle tension between text and image. She knows that a photograph changes meaning when placed beside another photograph. She also knows that a caption can either flatten a story or draw the viewer into it. At the same time, she occupies a bilingual and cross-cultural position that allows her to move between Chinese lived experience and the American public sphere. In that sense, she became a bridge—not only between image and text, but also between the community’s internal memory and the wider public world.
Extending the Work Beyond the Anniversary
Over the past three years, Lin Lu has continually helped make the Mayflower Church’s story more understandable to the broader public. She edited and published their exile memoir, and in media expression she has served as a kind of messenger, helping the community’s experience move beyond a small circle. This exhibition extends that work. It is not an inward-looking, self-enclosed retrospective. It is an invitation outward.
That outward reach will become even more visible on April 5, when the Mayor of Midland is expected to attend the third-anniversary commemoration. The moment therefore carries not only meaning within the community itself, but significance within the civic life of the city. What is being remembered is not merely the journey of a private group, but a human story that has entered the life of the city itself.
The Power of Signatures
Yet the deepest power of the exhibition lies in a quieter gesture: the signatures.
A group photograph records that, at one time and in one place, a number of people once stood together.
But when those same people, years later, lean over the photograph again and write their names by hand across its border, the image is no longer merely a document. It becomes a declaration: I was here. This happened to us. This story is affirmed by us.
The children participated as well. They were not standing outside history, waiting for adults to explain it to them someday. Through their signatures, they had already entered it. Memory must be handed down from one generation to the next.
This also reveals Lin Lu’s instinct as a curator. What she preserved was not simply a visual archive. What she helped create was a form of participatory memory practice—one in which the community itself became the active witness confirming the meaning of the images.
Sustained Labor and Spiritual Support
Over the past month, the exhibition occupied nearly all of her life. Selecting, writing, revising, coordinating, checking details, and responding to constantly emerging practical needs—this was not occasional volunteer work. It was daily, sustained labor.
Her husband, David, fully supported her throughout that time. The work of curating required not only time, but a concentrated heart. For Lin Lu to be understood and supported at home was itself a gift.
Yet she does not describe the month simply as hardship. She speaks instead of a deeper satisfaction, an inward nourishment. Though she was busy every day, she also felt inwardly sustained. The work, she says, was anointed—softened, upheld, and fulfilled by grace. The labor stretched from early morning until late at night, yet it was not empty. It carried a particular kind of joy.
Lin Lu has said that she herself has long benefited from the encouragement and support of spiritual elders. Now she finds herself taking on a similar role for others: that of a cheering trumpet and a midwife.
The first image suggests sounding encouragement.
The second suggests helping life come forth.
Both describe her place in this exhibition remarkably well.
Bringing the Story to Public View
The history of the Mayflower Church was already there. The suffering, endurance, gratitude, and faithfulness were already there. Lu did not create the story. What she did was help bring it forth—helping it gain form, language, order, and public visibility.
That this work came so naturally into her hands was not accidental. It was the fruit of three years of accompaniment and trust. She was not inventing concern for the sake of an anniversary. She was responding to a burden that had already matured within her.
In the end, Lin Lu took on this work because she had truly been moved by the Mayflower Church’s journey. This was an entirely voluntary project. It did not arise from title, institution, or contract. It arose from conviction.
She believed this story deserved to be seen seriously. She believed someone had to help shape it into a form accessible to the public. The question, then, was simple: Would the one who sees the need be willing to respond?
Lin Lu responded.
This exhibition goes beyond commemorating a date. It returns a story to those who actually lived it. It enables adults and children alike to recognize themselves again—not merely as subjects recorded by history, but as its living carriers. It gathers images once scattered across time and circumstance into a shared field of witness. And it begins to carry that witness outward, into public view.
Black signatures fell across the white borders of the photographs, one name after another.
And the Mayflower community, in both Chinese and English handwriting, seemed to say:
This is our story.
About Lin Lu
Lin Lu is a Chinese American painter, writer, oral history interviewer, and curator. She is the author of A Modern-Day Mayflower Pilgrimage: Oral Histories of Sixteen Families in Exile. Her work brings together art, memory, testimony, and public history, with a particular focus on faith, exile, community, and cross-cultural witness. Through writing, visual storytelling, and curatorial practice, she helps make overlooked human stories visible to the wider public.
Book: A Modern-Day Mayflower Pilgrimage: Oral Histories of Sixteen Families in Exile
Large Print; 8.5 x 0.76 x 11 in; Color; Paperback
