Fourteenth International Conference on the Inclusive Museum

Abstract

This paper presents a study about a museum and its formation of a black sense of place. Artist Fo Wilson was invited to create an installation of a slave cabin at the Lynden Sculpture Garden located in Milwaukee, the most segregated city in the US. The work imagines what an 19th-century woman of African descent who is a slave might collect. The fictional Eliza’s cabin vibrates with sensorial experiences that counter our knowledge of enslaved, Black women. We witness a “becoming,” where the materiality of the environment gives Eliza form and it in turn intra-acts with all who encounter it. People, plants, and objects act, react, and become with one another moving to co-creative relationships as Wilson calls on others to respond. All co-creations call us into connection with a web of movements, actions, and materials that construct modes of emplacement that materially and imaginatively situate historical and contemporary struggles.