Reimagining Little Liberia: Restoration & Reunion

Pathbreaking exhibit that introduces the story of Little Liberia, an endangered Black and Native American historic site located in Bridgeport, CT to the world through art, architecture, and history

Exhibit Highlights

• Paired scholars and artists to help visually and intellectually recover and reimagine an endangered historic place once populated by Black and Native American peoples
• Received planning and implementation grants totaling $25,000 from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts & Fairfield County’s Community Foundation
• Launched a major call for artists that supported the work of 8 local, international and majority BIPOC artists
• Hosted an artists and scholars workshop in Spring 2017
• Served as vital education and outreach programing for both the Mary & Eliza Freeman Center for History and Community, Inc., and the Housatonic Museum of Art

Demonstration of Quality of Exhibit Venue

This exhibit was installed at Housatonic Museum of Art in Fall 2017 and continues to run through the present. HMA is located on the campus of Housatonic Community College in Downtown Bridgeport, CT. It is a stone’s throw from Bridgeport’s larger art district, and a short walk under the railroad overpass to the historic Little Liberia neighborhood known more presently as the South End. . HMA was founded in 1967 by the late Burt Chernow who was a professor of art at the College, as well as an art collector.  According to HMA’s history Chernow collected over 5,000 pieces of art, almost entirely through donations; and “Today, the HMA has over 6,000 pieces, about as many as the number of HCC’s students, and is one of the largest art collections of any two-year college in the United States.”

Project Background

This project was literally birthed in the wake of completing my doctoral dissertation in 2014. Fresh off the high of having spent the past year writing what I hoped would become a game-changing spatial history that not only validated Little Liberia’s existence within the city of Bridgeport, but also situated the embattled historic site within a broader Atlantic world contexts; I began conceptualizing a full-sensory, media rich exhibit to introduce the wider public to this inspiring historic and contemporary space I had come to know quite well. The motivation to create an exhibit was also informed by conversations I had while collecting oral histories and doing fieldwork throughout the city of Bridgeport in the summer of 2011. Each time an interview wrapped up the participant would look at me with eyes that were both excited and curious and ask, “so what are you gonna do with all this?” The most obvious answer to anyone within the hallowed halls of academia was to write a book, and so I shrugged my shoulders and conceded in that yes, one day I would write a book. Yet, in my heart I knew that a book was not my only goal because a book alone was not the kind of response that this history needed. To tell the story of a place that has been forgotten and then struggled to be recognized against an ever changing urban landscape that is rooted in narratives of Black despair and post-industrial decline requires more than a book, it required creativity and expediency. You see Little Liberia was an endangered site and like many endangered sites it was fighting a race against time. As I write in “Digital Reconnaissance (Re)locating dark spots on a Map,” for the forthcoming Digital Black Atlantic, volume,

In addition, natural elements like wind, rain and snow have been even more threatening than human intervention or a lack thereof. Yet the biggest threat to this endangered site has been time itself. Over time the story of the site gets told and retold in slightly conflicting ways; and community engagement peaks, dips and wanes, as does the site’s importance to local initiatives.

Thus, time, or what seemed to be the lack thereof made it necessary for me to adjust my output method and first create something that people could touch, feel, and see within less time than it takes to publish a book. So just days after filing my dissertation I spoke with Maisa Tisdale, President & CEO of the Mary & Eliza Freeman Center (the non-profit organization that owns the Mary and Eliza Freeman historic homes and champions the preservation of both the homes and Little Liberia’s history) and we hatched a plan to reimagine Little Liberia through a design process that paired my recent scholarship with local artists. We discussed potential venues, additional parters, overall goals, and the official planning kicked off in 2015 with two successful grant applications. The first, coming from The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in Fine Art which funded my proposal through its Grants for Individuals Award in 2015 [see the online profile here], and Fairfield County’s Community Foundation which funded a version of this same proposal in January 2016 and was awarded to the Mary & Eliza Freeman Center. While the original exhibit concept was intended to play upon my strengths in both digital humanities and public history, a series of unforeseen changes to the exhibit venue, that were outside of our control, resulted in a less interactive, yet still very poignant exhibit.

In 2016 we released a call for Visual Artists in hopes of attracting local, talented yet underrepresented artists. Together the eight selected artist help tell a story that is unique to Bridgeport, but global in scope. It is the story of free people of color who fashioned community at a time when the majority of Black and Native American communities particularly in the south and the northeast were facing servitude and enslavement or some form of forced migration under “Indian Removal” policy. The artists captured various aspects of Little Liberia’s history in mediums that ranged from oil on canvas, to watercolors, mixed media, photography and even poetry. So while the final results were not exactly as I mapped out in that first proposal, the end result was nonetheless outstanding.