Furthering the Independence Seaport Museum mission as a maritime museum focused on the Delaware River, its people and the environment and how it connects to the larger world, the museum is embarking on a new, multi-year project, “Breaking Uncommon Ground on the Delaware River,” an initiative that will collect oral histories from African-American Philadelphians who lived and worked along the Delaware River in the mid- to the late 20th- and 21st-centuries. These stories will guide further development and expansion of the museum’s flagship exhibition, Tides of Freedom: The African Presence on the Delaware River. When completed, “Breaking Uncommon Ground” will include an audio/visual component, an online presence through ISM’s YouTube channel and an online archive of the stories in the J. Welles Henderson Research Center there.
Tides of Freedom opened in May 2013 and has been a cornerstone of ISM’s visitor experience ever since. Originally conceived by a committee of leading African American scholars and curated by Dr. Tukufu Zuberi, the University of Pennsylvania’s Lasry Family professor of race relations and professor of sociology and Africana studies, the exhibition enables visitors to explore the concept of freedom through the lens of the African experience along the Delaware River. Featuring objects from ISM’s collection and organized by four critical periods in America’s history—enslavement, emancipation, Jim Crow and the civil rights movement—Tides of Freedom urges guests to bear witness. “Breaking Uncommon Ground on the Delaware River” will extend the narrative of Tides of Freedom to present day through the stories shared by elders in the community and by creating a more intergenerational experience for visitors.
“I believe that the only limit to our success with this project is time; with every obituary that appears in the newspaper, the stories of the African-American community in the last quarter of the 20th-century are lost forever,” said Peter S. Seibert, president and CEO of the Independence Seaport Museum. “This is why developing this oral history project has been so exciting and incredibly important for the ISM. Collecting and preserving the stories of this community will be the first and most critical step, and then returning those stories to the community through a number of different avenues, including as part of a substantial expansion of our permanent exhibition, Tides of Freedom.”
You can read more in an article published in the artdaily web site at: https://tinyurl.com/yck29yc.