finding my Place

About Finding My Place

Finding My Place is an in-progress full-length puppet theater work by Chicago-based artist Samuel J. Lewis, II that excavates family history, memory, and inheritance through a visually layered performance language. Drawing from an extensive trove of research and personal documentation shared by John Marshall—alongside Lewis’s own ongoing archival investigation—the piece traces generations of Sam’s family story across time, geography, and shifting social realities. 

Blending documentary material with poetic staging, Finding My Place uses puppetry, projected imagery, recorded testimony, and sculptural objects to animate ancestors whose lives reverberate into the present. Letters, photographs, and oral histories become tactile performance elements, inviting audiences to witness how history is constructed, remembered, and sometimes withheld. As fragments of the past surface, Sam confronts questions of belonging, faith, migration, racial identity, and artistic inheritance. 

At its heart, the work asks: What does it mean to “find one’s place” when that place has been shaped by silence, survival, and resilience? Through an intimate yet expansive theatrical form, Lewis positions puppetry as both an archaeological tool and a spiritual practice—excavating lineage while crafting a future grounded in truth.

 SUPPORT THIS PROJECT