By MARY JANE JACOB and TUMELO MOSAKA, Co-Curators

Charleston is a city rich in history, yet there are aspects of history that remain little known, even to longtime residents and like everywhere else, personal and social circumstances play a role in creating meaning.  In a strange way the evidence of history is both visible and invisible, depending on who’s telling the story and to whom it is being told.  One gets the sense that there is a lot that still remains unsaid for many reasons, one of which is grief.  For African-Americans, it is the grief for suffering the Middle Passage through slavery, while for the white Southerners, as Neill Bogan comments here, it is for the Confederate dead.  

On the surface, the city seems to be sanitized from its contested history of violence and brutality.  This grief remains unacknowledged and hardly is articulated in a manner that addresses the deep scares felt by many Charlestonians.  This unresolved historical legacy has become hereditary, differences and inequalities have become an unquestionable reality that for many seems to be tradition now.  The path to changing these attitudes is a long and narrow one, it needs sensitivity and patience.  It is no accident that art has been used as a tool to initiate ideas and communication across race, gender, and ethnicity.  “Evoking History” has adopted the approach of listening across cultures and communities as a way to engage these diverse histories. 

For the 2001 Spoleto Festival USA and on the occasion of the festival’s 25th anniversary, “Evoking History,” a three-year initiative was launched.  Its first year centered on three projects, each based on personal narratives and manifested in a play, workshops and exhibitions, installations and a garden.  In each instance, the lead artist, selected and commissioned by the festival, enlisted a team of community persons to collaborate with them. 

Ping Chong’sSecret Histories explored the effects of history and the displacement of peoples through contemporary testimony.  Its genre of documentary theater was developed around five Charleston-area women who are not actors by profession but who stepped on stage, moving out of their ordinary roles, to share extraordinary stories from their own lives. During the collaborative process, Chong, as director, and Talvin Wilks, as playwright, interviewed nearly thirty members of the community; each individual came from a different background, embodying in his or her own unique way, the complexity of cultural identity in today’s world.   Arriving at the final casting, the content and subtexts their individual narratives evoked were interwoven, drawing parallels and resonances among their experiences.  In offering a different perspective on the history and culture of Charleston, their compelling stories of real-life experience became the start of a community dialogue—spoken and unspoken-- between the actors and audiences.  This production became at once a transformative experience on both sides of the theater—as actor Luanne Edwards writes the experience, “validated myself by claiming it publicly,” or as spectator Kendra Hamilton realized, “that experience seems to have completely healed the wounds that I've been carrying around in my heart from growing up in that sick and seductive city since childhood.”

In a different scenario, Lonnie Graham—an artist, photographer, and educator--developed the The Heritage Garden Project on Charleston’s Eastside at Wilmot J. Fraser Elementary School. Honoring the rich agricultural history and its African roots, Graham collaborated with horticulturalist Harry Noisette whose vast knowledge about plants, together with his passion for and willingness to share his knowledge, made a the garden a place attracted a wide range of people.  As teacher La’Sheia Oubre shared: “He was the embodiment of the garden; he possessed all that the garden had to teach us.”  Guided by Noisette, the children planted traditional crops such as corn, beans, radish, peanuts, and okra from a variety of heirloom seeds from the eastern part of the United States.  Endowing the garden with historical significance, they worked with the school children and local residents to cultivate foodstuff for the purposes of educating and developing intergenerational dialogue between youth and adults that continues to grow, making this a story only partly told.  Furthermore, this project was developed into a living laboratory for the teaching of science, math, English, and history.  Its historical significance was intended to impart a deeper knowledge on the connection between the Lowcountry and the African continent and this will be undertaken in Year II of “Evoking History” through a cross-continental email exchange. 

Graham furthered explored the theme of the Middle Passage was further explored with an installation linking the formal dining room with slave quarters at Historic Charleston Foundation’s Aiken-Rhett House, an urban plantation built in 1818 that is a complete document of antebellum life.  The work, entitled A Recollection of Tomorrow was an act of acknowledgement to those ancestors who came to Charleston and found themselves in servitude to others.  Their dreams, according to Graham, have become our reality, the present becomes a dream of the past.  By projecting images of contemporary Charlestonians and Ghanaians on to the layers of history still evident in the walls of this house, Graham metaphorically connected Charleston’s historic legacy to the history of the African Diaspora.  A red cascading velvet drape puddled onto the floor, evoking images of blood and beauty.  Underneath it laid the dreams: simple, elegant blue sheer curtains embroidered with the design of the constellations of the Northern Hemisphere, to which many looked for freedom and hope.  This work in a second phase became collaboration with Jerushia Graham and a nearby community of quilters; they are transforming this luscious drapery into a commemorative quilt, appliquéing the dream designs of Fraser School students. 

Finally, Graham completed his trilogy with a work entitled Sentinel at Drayton Hall, an outstanding example of Palladian architecture in America and one of the oldest surviving plantation, completed in 1742 and built by both European and African slave craftsmen.  Here he invited self-trained artist Thaddeus Mosley to create an installation in an unmarked slave cemetery; he created an installation of memorial markers recalling the carved pole figures found in burial grounds in Zaire and Africa- American slave grounds in Georgia. In the accompanying words of scholar James Wylie, they “represent our eternal legacy.”

Historical legacy in Charleston is made visible by monuments, but they only celebrate and commemorate the history of white Southerners.  Writer-artist Neill Bogan approached the difficult subject of monument making and its function as civic marker.  His collaborative project Rehearsing the Past: Looking at the City from Another Direction, undertaken with nine area-artists, a poet, architect, video maker, and youth educator, was aimed at providing new visions of monuments and memorializations in the city through multiple modes of expression.  Bogan workshopped the project over a six month-time period, leading group discussion on  a myriad of related ideas.  The creative group became charged with reinterpreting Charleston’s past through their own works.  Over the course of their meetings, they continually challenged each other with questions surrounding the use of public space for memorialization in Charleston--“Who deserves monuments? Who decides? And how does your family reference the past?”—which were core to understanding the political nature of making monuments.  The responses presented included a storefront exhibition of artworks; broadsides with questions, dialogue quotes, jokes, poems, and statements on present and future expressions of Charleston’s past which were placed throughout the city; a movable wall that allowed passersby to examine the nine familiar Charleston sights in a new way; community conversations about the changing demographics within the peninsula; and tour on the Schooner Pride to look at the city from another direction, revealing views and visions for Charleston’s rich harbor and long history with the sea.  Bogan believes that a significant cultural barrier exists in America in how people honor and formulate the past. This project aimed, on the one hand, to expose the problem of creating exclusive histories through commemorative symbols and, on the other, to imagine something more.

“Rehearsing the Past,” Frank Martin has written, “thrust the spectator into a philosophical and speculative quagmire for which,” he feels, “the American educational system has failed to prepare its general public. There is no answer to such a question; the point of this exercise is in the simple contemplation of the question; its consideration becomes its value.”

Histories, like art, changes meaning over time, from person to person and place to place. The artists this year – lead artists Ping Chong and Talvin Wilks, Lonnie Graham, and Neill Bogan - came from different artistic traditions and modes of expression.  Yet they brought to this investigation a common artmaking process that enabled a wide and uncommon spectrum of individuals to become engaged in art and ideas.  Critical to this process was the ability and interest to listen and to reflect in communal ways—through art and dialogue--upon these issues of heritage today which “Evoking History” projects continue to explore.