Noelle Lorraine Williams
The curator of this exhibition is Newark-based historian, artist and Rutgers University Newark Alumni, Noelle Lorraine Williams. She states, “You can’t see it now – but right in the center of downtown Newark some of this country’s most radical Black Christian activists like Frederick Douglass fought against slavery and injustice. Newark’s first three Black churches, all on the campus of Rutgers University Newark and Essex County College, are gone too. Can we imagine these radical people and movements without buildings? Artists in the exhibition include Reggie Blanding, Jerry Gant, Marc Lorenc, Noelle Lorraine Williams and Stafford Woods. Join us on a journey utilizing never seen before objects found in the ground during excavation of a local church. While the buildings are gone their ideas and writings still exist. Can they be used to step into these worlds?
Invisible Cities (Newark) Project
This is a multi-year project focusing on collaborations with individuals to bring to light new knowledge about the city of Newark, to tell many stories about this place. This project is centered around 25,000 artifacts that were excavated from a city block in a historic part of Newark which is now part of the Rutgers Campus (bordered by Washington, Halsey, New and Linden Streets). The title was inspired by Italian author Italo Calvino, and it suggests that we might consider the possibility of plural histories of a city, and that there are many histories of any city that have remained hidden from us.
