Join us Wednesday, December 16 for an online conversation with Dr. Tiffany Momon and Dr. Torren Gatson of Black Craftspeople Digital Archive. Glen Foerd is thrilled to host this virtual event featuring two scholars that are changing the field of material culture studies today, bringing long overdue attention to black craftspeople whose work has been unrecognized by museums and decorative arts communities.
This conversation is free, and will be held on Zoom. Advanced registration is required.
About the Project:
From 1619 to beyond, black craftspeople, both free and enslaved, worked to produce the valued architecture, handcrafts, and decorative arts of the American South. The Black Craftspeople Digital Archive seeks to enhance what we know about black craftspeople by telling both a spatial story and a historically informed story that highlights the lives of black craftspeople and the objects they produced. The first phase of this project focuses on black craftspeople living and laboring in the eighteenth-century South Carolina Lowcountry.
Founded in 2019, the BCDA brings together scholars, students, museums and archives professionals and the public to collaborate and spread the story of black craftspeople. The BCDA originally began as a project founded by Dr. Tiffany Momon and inspired by her research into John “Quash” Williams, an enslaved and later free black master carpenter responsible for the carpentry and joinery work on the c. 1750 Charles Pinckney Mansion in Charleston, South Carolina. Momon’s research into Williams led to the development of a map tracing Williams’s life around Charleston and soon, that map incorporated places associated with the enslaved black craftsmen who aided Williams in the construction of the Pinckney Mansion. By Fall 2019, the project expanded to include more black craftspeople in Charleston involved in a variety of trades. The archive continues to grow daily.
Learn more at blackcraftspeople.org!
About the Presenters:
Dr. Tiffany Momon is a public historian and Visiting Assistant Professor at Sewanee, The University of the South, with years of experience participating in the preservation of community histories. Her work has taken her throughout the southeast, organizing community based historic preservation projects in locations such as Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the Alabama black belt, and the Kentucky segments of the Trail of Tears. Momon is the founder and co-director of the Black Craftspeople Digital Archive (blackcraftspeople.org), a black digital humanities project that centers black craftspeople, their lives, and their contributions to the making and building of America. Throughout her career, Momon has lectured on the subject of black craftspeople at organizations such as the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, Historic Charleston Foundation, Winterthur Museum and Gardens, the Daughters of the American Revolution Museum and others.
Dr. Torren Gatson is an assistant professor in the department of history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. A native of Wilmington Delaware, Gatson, completed his B.A. and M.A. from North Carolina Central University and his Ph.D. from Middle Tennessee State University. Gatson is a trained public historian and a scholar of nineteenth and twentieth century U.S., southern history, with an emphasis on the African American built environment. He is a historic preservationist who conceptualizes the impact of African American material culture on the physical and cultural landscape. Gatson is currently the guest editor for the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts Journal’s special edition on African American material culture. In the public realm, Gatson works with communities to build lasting public products that reflect the dynamic and difficult aspects of African American history.