Underground RI/Lost & Unknown
My career as a scholar has been defined by inter-disciplinary historical research, public engagement in Black cultural communities and a concern with how artists shape history. As an undergraduate at Brown I worked on projects like the 2003/2004 historical exhibition Underground Rhode Island, which developed from an oral history project conducted over several years of a course into a small exhibition at a Rhode Island Historical Society gallery space and later filled a larger gallery at The Newport Art Museum. Curating Underground gave me my first experience using a broad range of historical materials to tell a story that was just one part of an on-going local narrative. I not only shaped an over-arching historical narrative using existing oral histories collected by students, I also visited people’s personal collections of ephemera and worked with them to determine what objects would best showcase the themes raised by their stories. I learned that I have a talent for cultivating relationships with and soliciting artifacts from artists, both skills that I bring to my current work in Chicago.
From Brown's Webpage: "There have been two, or (to be more precise) three exhibits emanating from the Underground Rhode Island project. The first was curated by Sara Agniel for the Aldrich House, Rhode Island Historical Society during May, 2004, consisting of materials gathered on early interview occasions. This exhibit was disassembled and reassembled by four Brown University students—Megan Hall, Krista Ingebretson, Micah Salkind and Julia Wolfson—as "Lost and Unknown: Stories from Rhode Island's Underground." In this version, it was exhibited from July 10 to September 6, at the Newport Art Museum and Art Association, for the very special summer celebrating a fifty year anniversary of the Newport Jazz Festival. The exhibit moved on to the John Nicholas Brown Center for the Study of American Civilization at Brown University, for the Fall season, its final showing. It was succeeded by a second (or third) exhibit put together by a number of the current students in "Oral History: Theory and Methods," drawing upon new interviews. Cassie Tharinger, Nolan Shutler, John Butler, Monica M. Martinez and Micah Salkind were especially active in the assembling of the exhibit, which opened in February, 2005, at the John Nicholas Brown Center and closed there in April."
Project image courtesy of William Logia