When Worlds Meet

After you curate an exhibit, you usually face a pile of loose ends.  

some of the test prints from Reflections

 Last week, as I was looking at a printout of the collections record for one of the images in the show, I suddenly realised that women in the middle with the fabulous ruffled dress looks an awful lot like my neighbor. 

 

 

We don't live on the kind of street where you spend a lot of time interacting. We don't have a HOA, we don't live on a cul-de-sac. We don't have block parties.  Still, my neighbor, who has clearly lived in her house a long time, has been waving at my son since he was small. And she works on Election Day at our local polling station. So we'd chatted a few times about how much he has grown over the years.  

 



2006 and 2015

 

I didn't just want to go over and shove a photo in her face and say "is this you" without some kind of confirmation.  So I went back to the Museum's cataloging record.  And, the woman in the ruffled dress had been identified earlier as Evelyn Coston Hinnant.  I double checked the New Hanover County tax records (where you can look up and see who owns property in the county), and discovered that I seemed to be right - a Mrs. Hinnant lived across the street from us. 

 

And so I took her a copy of the photograph.  Mrs. Hinnant was delighted to see her younger self, and eagerly identified the two women standing next to her.  The woman on the right was Barbara Graham, a classmate of Evelyn's when she was Evelyn Coston, Willistonian, Class of 1947.  Mrs.Hinnant identified the other women as Virginia Pearsall. 

 

Some days, it feels like its a very a good day to be a public historian.  And connecting my neighbor to the past, and glimpsing the joy it seemed to bring her, made Monday June 15 a very good day.

 

 

 

 

Making Reflections



Reflections main label, before all the vinyl letters were all added, May 2015

I've spent parts of the last 4 years thinking about the history of Wilmington in the 1950s and 1960s  for an exhibition project. And on May 15, 2015, Reflections in Black and White opened to the public. 

Reflections asks a seemingly simple question:  "What does looking at informal images of black and white Wilmington tell us about the 1950s and 1960s?"

The exhibit showcases 4 collections of photographs that date from 1950s and 1960s Wilmington. These black and white photographs were taken by black and white residents of the Port City.



Photographer Herbert Howard

First, in 1992, Henrietta Adams donated a collection of more than 1,000 photographs to the Museum.  They were taken by her brother, Herbert Howard, who was a postal worker and semi-professional photographer.  His rich collection documents many black families' rites of passage - weddings, graduations, church events, and the more day-to-day events.



Artist Claude Howell
 

In 1997, local artist Claude Howell died, and left his scrapbooks to the Cape Fear Museum.  These scrapbooks contain all sorts of ephemera and contain some wonderful photographs of Claude's friends, and of the North Carolina coast.  Claude's images came to mind because he took (or included) a compelling set of images that show African American longshoremen on the Wilmington waterfront.  These images seemed to both speak for themselves and speak to each other about race relations at the time.











Student Nurse Elizabeth Ashworth (left)



As I was looking through the Museum's photographs, I kept coming back to the photographs that Elizabeth Ashworth Horne donated to the Museum in 2001.

Elizabeth attended James Walker Memorial Hospital's School of Nursing between 1945 and 1948.   At the time, the nursing school was segregated, and only women attended.

In some ways, Elizabeth's photographs capture the flip side of the world represented in Herbert Howard's photos.  Elizabeth's nursing school images captures some of the experiences of  a tight knit group of white friends, just as Herbert Howard's images seem to capture a sense of the deep connections between local African Americans.




Camera Shop Envelope

The final set of photos were a collection of photo envelopes that were left behind at the Camera Shop, a local photo store.

The Camera Shop collection was donated to the Museum in 2012 by Michelle Masson.  It is made up of more than 150 envelopes of images of both black and white Wilmingtonians. 

So what do these four disparate sets of photographs have in common? 


Well, as I looked through them, I couldn't help notice that black and white Wilmngtonians were doing the same things - eating, hanging out, having parties, taking pictures of children, houses, loved ones - but they weren't doing those things together. 

So putting these collections on the wall together seemed to be an intriguing way to ask people to think about what it was like to live in a segregated world.

Top left and middle - Camera Shop photos; top right - Elizabeth Ashworth snapshot; bottom left - Herbert Howard image; bottom right - Claude Howell and his friends

I hope that people who visit the exhibit will reflect on the past they'll see on view, and think more deeply about how race has shaped Americans' lived experiences.