Literature & Arts Digital Exhibits

This collection of exhibits engages with pre-twentieth-century representations of texts and art. Included are figures of early Black Boston music and visual arts, such as early jazz figures Cy and Charlie Shribman, visual artists like Scipio Moorhead and Edmonia Lewis, writers Phillis Wheatley Peters and David Walker,and collective groups such as the African-American Female Intelligence Society of Boston. This collection also includes cultural production about early Black Bostonians such as Chloe Russell’s dream book. The goal of this collection is to make visible the creative textual and visual arts of Early Black Bostonians. These exhibits showcase the diversity of  Blackness and the heterogeneous ways that culture, history, resistance, and being are represented.

This exhibit explores the history of jazz, delves into Boston’s complicated relationship with the genre, and examines how racism and prejudice in the city have influenced 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.

This collection of exhibits explores the social and historical contexts of The Complete Fortune Teller and Dream Book (1842). Supposedly written by a free Black Bostonian woman named Chloe Russell, who might have been the same Chloe Russell who ran a boarding house in Boston’s West End.

 

Exhibit Coming Soon!

 

Exhibit Coming Soon!

A digital exhibit that highlights the various places and locations associated with Phyllis Wheatley Peters, as well as her international movements.

The Colored American Magazine was one of the earliest magazines in the United States that was dedicated to African-American culture, literature, and social issues. It covered a wide range of topics, including literature, poetry, art, music, history, politics, and civil rights.

The Afric-American Female Intelligence Society worked together to promote literacy in the streets of Boston. In addition to being a pillar of the community, this organization of Black women was dedicated to preserving and cultivating their community.

Phillis Wheatley Peters is recognized as the first African-American to publish a volume of poetry. As a child, she was kidnapped from West Africa and sold in slavery to the Wheatley family. It was here in Boston that she learned to read and write.

Pauline Hopkins was a Black woman recognized widely in the 19th century as an intellectual, a singer, and a novelist. She's known for being the editor of the Colored Cooperative Publishing Company, as well as her efforts promoting racial equality and uplift.