The Great Migration was the largest mass movement of people in American history. Between the 1910s and the 1970s, roughly six million African Americans relocated from the South to urban cities in the North and West.
A new travelling exhibit showcasing the major industry and social changes birthed by the Great Migration has arrived in Chicago. It’s called “A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration,” and it’s on display at the Chicago Cultural Center through April 27. The award-winning exhibit is free and open to the public daily from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
“[The exhibit] is such a unique show, I think, because it really took the specific experience and history of the Great Migration and tried to open it up in ways that were expansive and universal,” said co-curator Jessica Bell Brown.
Co-organized by the Mississippi Museum of Art (MMA) and the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA), the exhibition and archival project is supported by philanthropic dollars and hosted by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE).
Co-curators Brown and Ryan N. Dennis selected artists from around the country that uniquely expanded on their personal relationship with the Great Migration. There’s striking murals, engaging video projects, and immersive sculptures that challenge visitors’ conception of the historical movement. Photographs, familial documents, and relevant magazines from the 20th century serve as a backdrop to the exhibit.
“We were very interested in how contemporary artists envisioned their relationship with the American South,” Brown said to The TRiiBE. She also serves as the executive director of the Institution for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University. “We understand how the artists were parsing the ways in which the Great Migration showed up not only in their family stories, but in their creative pursuits as artists.”
The exodus had an outsized impact on everything from transportation industries (i.e. The Pullman Company) and culinary lineages that had been preserved for generations. Once they arrived in cities like Chicago, Detroit, New York, Los Angeles and Baltimore, Black Americans were forced to create a hybrid culture — one that included their Southern roots while also adapting to the new climates, agricultures, and ways of life in bustling urban centers.
The exhibit features work from 12 renowned artists: Akea Brionne, Mark Bradford, Zoë Charlton, Larry W. Cook, Torkwase Dyson, Theaster Gates Jr., Allison Janae Hamilton, Leslie Hewitt, Steffani Jemison, Robert Pruitt, Jamea Richmond-Edwards, and Carrie Mae Weems. Gates, a renowned social practice artist based in Chicago, is behind local projects including the Rebuild Foundation, A Listening Space, and restoration of the Stony Island Arts Bank.
Each artist provides an entirely unique take on their own family histories and relationship to generational migrations: from extensive tapestries of family portraits to a mock double-wide trailer capturing the culinary history of pickled delicacies. The latter examines how post-Civil War scarcity in the South led to new ways of preserving any leftover food. Thus, pickling rose to popularity and remains a part of the Southern palate.
“There are usually a lot of layers between [the artists’] personal stories and how their work is manifested materially, formally, intellectually,” Brown said. “This exhibition, or the spirit of this exhibition, asked for a kind of inversion of that calculus — to really start first with the personal, with the historical, and then create a new body of work that unpacked those stories and those legacies.”
In addition to the art pieces created, the curators have also developed two complementary resources: an online microsite and a two-volume publication.
The interactive microsite allows for visitors to upload recordings of their family histories and map their family’s journey around the world. Visitors also can upload their stories at GreatMigrationLegacies.org. The accompanying publication is made up of additional reading materials containing major archival discoveries from Brown and Dennis’ research.
These discoveries include a little-known Black homesteader colony in the 1920s known as Blackdom, New Mexico that adds another layer of Black southerners embarking on liberatory and diverse pathways during the Great Migration.
These archives, along with the pieces on the exhibit floor, effectively encourage new imaginations of past and present Black migrations around the world.
“This show allows people a way to unpack how their own journeys were sort of nested within the journeys of people who came before them. Whether it’s about the Great Migration, or your family arrived on Ellis Island, there’s so many ways to get at this question,” Brown said. “I’m just excited the show became one of those avenues.”
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