The museum’s Inaugural Exhibition will introduce visitors
to Maryland’s African American heritage via three galleries
and major content areas: Family and Community, Labor that
Built a Nation, and Art and Enlightenment. Each will tell
the story of perseverance, triumph and the celebration of
life through the inspiring history and living culture of
Maryland’s African Americans.
After the Parade, (ca.1996),
North Avenue Series
James E. Lewis Museum of Art, Morgan
State University
Unknown Woman wearing straw hat
Visitors will learn how 200 years of slavery wrenched and
sometimes broke the bonds of family and community among
African Americans in Maryland. Men, women and children were
torn from their loved ones, isolated, and sold to strangers.
Yet Maryland’s African Americans continuously recreated
and renewed these bonds of family and community in order
to endure the centuries of brutality and decades of oppression
and suppression that followed. Black Marylanders created
tools for survival and self-determination, proving the power
of their commitment to one another by building and sustaining
families, communities of worship, neighborhoods, towns and
social organizations.
Chesapeake Oystermen
Archives of the Peabody Institue of the Johns Hopkins University
For two centuries, Africans were
brought to Maryland against their will and kept here by
violence, forced to work on plantations and farms, in shops
and kitchens and in iron forges and shipyards. Visitors
to the museum will learn how this tragic history of slavery
and oppression enriched the state and the nation, and how
its vestiges harmed our entire society.
Despite the emotional and societal devastation of slavery
and oppression, African Americans developed valuable trades
through their native skills and exploited labor, which they
employed in their struggle for opportunity, achievement
and success.
Cab Calloway, Chick Webb
Photograph Credit: Archives of the Peabody Institute of
the Johns Hopkins University
African Americans poured the emotions of a displaced and disenfranchised
people into painting, music, dance and language. The Art and
Enlightenment Gallery tells the story of how Africans arriving
in Maryland by slave ship carried with them ancient cultural
traditions and skills in music, art, dance, sculpture, storytelling
and literature.
In the centuries of racism that followed, African Americans
used art as a way of enduring and even overcoming an oppressive
society. From this struggle emerged unique and universal works
of music, literature, dance and art. Like artists everywhere,
African Americans used their craft to express a personal sense
of beauty, to strive for excellence in performance and to
forge a spiritual connection with their creator.
