Contemporary Connections Digital Exhibits
This exhibit collection focuses on highlighting the connections between Boston’s earliest Black histories and the twentieth- and twenty-first-centuries. These exhibits engage with how contemporary events and concepts such as the Boston Bussing movement, gentrification, and white feminism are grounded in past histories that inevitably shape the present, as well as the ways they often resonate and build upon the past, often in creative ways. This collection also foregrounds more experimental exhibits and projects that are intended to explore, build, and create legacies and cultivate technologies of resistance.
Explores issues of displacement, gentrification, and the challenges faced by underserved communities in resisting the expansion of modern-day universities.
This exhibit examines the continuing resonances of the histories of enslavement in New England by exploring the debate surrounding the inclusion of the Royall family crest as part of Harvard Law School’s seal. the Royall family's fortune derived from enslaved people’s labor on their Antiguan plantations.
This exhibit examines the links between past and present movements for racial justice in Boston Public Schools. In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Boston students, parents, and community members were organizing an uphill battle against inequality in the city’s public schools, and these movements and their power structures continue today.
This exhibit looks at the history of Jazz and tracing the, at times, problematic history of Boston’s complex relationship jazz and examine the role that the city’s history of racism and prejudice plays in jazz's development
This exhibit uplifts and centers the lives and works of black visual artists, including Scipio Moorhead, Edmonia Lewis, and Edward Bannister, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These figures are alike in their deliberate overcoming of barriers, including, but not limited to, slavery, interpersonal racism, and institutional racism.