RE-IMAGINING SLAVE CABINS TO HONOR RI ENSLAVED
IFE FRANKLIN
Acclaimed Boston artist Ifé Franklin leads community activation at PPL this Saturday
PROVIDENCE, RI, March 10 — An immersive, intergenerational art-making event honoring the lives enslaved Black people in RI is headed to Providence Public Library this weekend, led by multidisciplinary artist Ifé Franklin.
At a time when markers of African-American history are being threatened with erasure, “Art-Making for the Ancestors: Ifé Franklin’s Ancestor Slave Cabin Workshop” will spotlight a potent symbol of U.S. slavery.: the cabin dwellings where everyday Black Americans resisted their enslavement by living, loving, and creating community.
“How can we rescue this history?” Franklin said of the community workshop, an outgrowth of the artist’s decade-long Indigo Project, in which she erects life-size replica cabins in outdoor spaces. “How can we take all of that pain, all of that brutality, and make something beautiful out of it?”
The hands-on workshop invites participants to design their own miniature dwellings using fabric, beads, shells, raffia, and images celebrating Black identity.
By radically re-imagining slave cabins, the workshop seeks to transform the trauma of slavery through objects of beauty and dignity.
Franklin, a descendant whose great-grandmother escaped slavery in the South, described the mini-structures as “offerings to the spirits of these ancestors, who never had a home of their own.”
“Art-Making for the Ancestors” is presented by Research BIPOC History (RBH), a volunteer research effort working to document the lives of enslaved and free Black and Indigenous people who resided in present-day Bristol, RI, between 1680 and the Civil War.
The event is being co-sponsored by Providence Cultural Equity Initiative and Tufts University’s Office of the Vice Provost for Research.
Kendall Reiss, a Bristol-based artist, professor at Tufts’ School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and project lead for RBH, said that art-making in community brings a vital dimension to efforts by researchers to confront Rhode Island’s outsize role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. “Ifé Franklin’s capacity to create beauty and hold space for the ancestors through her art is, in itself, an act of resistance,” Reiss said.
“Artistic modes of resistance are, and have been, critical in historical truth-telling and bringing attention to social issues,” she said. “Art is integral, especially now, in bringing community together. This gathering provides an opportunity for participants to come together, in acknowledgement and remembrance, to honor the lives of those who were enslaved in Rhode Island.”
“Art-Making for the Ancestors” will run from 12-3pm, Saturday, Mar. 15 at Providence Public Library. The workshop is free and open to the public. It marks the first event in Rhode Island for Franklin, whose work has been exhibited at the Slave Dwellings Project in South Carolina and The National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington D.C., as well as throughout Massachusetts, including MFA, Boston, Royall House and Slave Quarters, Fitchburg Museum of Art, UMass Boston, Bentley University, Franklin Park, and the Boston Public Art Triennial.