400: A Collective Flight of Memory
Exhibit Open House
Thursday, April 9
1:30–4:30 PM
Join us at the Center for the Study of the American South to view work from 400: A Collective Flight of Memory, curated by Jamaal Barber. The exhibition was first shown in Atlanta, Georgia, and created in collaboration with black artists of the diaspora.
In an essay about the 400 exhibit (featured in the “Here/Away” Issue), Barber writes, “In a 1619 letter to the treasurer of the Virginia Company of London, Jamestown colonist John Rolfe recorded the arrival of ’20. and odd negroes’ off the coast of Virginia. You can go to the beach where the ships arrived and stand in the same sand under the same sky and look at the same ocean that those enslaved Africans witnessed. There is a timelessness to that moment. There is a connection to a cultural memory that has been passed down. Now it is 2019. I want to discuss the black American experience, but it is not my story to tell alone.”
Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of the American South.