The public is invited to a free program exploring The Umbrella Arts Center’s outdoors public art ramble, Weaving an Address, a site-specific exhibition of work by prominent Black artists commemorating colonial-era Black residents of Concord’s famed Walden Woods.
On Saturday, July 19 at 3PM, curator and artist Marla McLeod will lead a guided tour of the artwork installed at Brister’s Hill in Walden Woods, named for Brister Freeman, an enslaved man who won his freedom by serving in the Revolutionary War and then bought the property and lived there along with other formerly enslaved before Thoreau.
The tour will be followed at 4:30PM by refreshments and a panel discussion back at The Umbrella Arts Center (40 Stow Street, Concord, MA) with McLeod in dialogue with historian Elise Lemire, author of Black Walden: Slavery and Its Aftermath in Concord, Massachusetts, who was recently a subject of the new international documentary, Concord’s Secret History, just released on over 500 PBS stations. Saturday’s discussion will examine the “journey from archive to art,” and Lemire’s scholarly research that fueled Weaving’s creative installations.
Part of the town’s Revolution250 celebrations, this program is co-presented by The Umbrella Arts Center, The Walden Woods Project and The Robbins House: Concord’s African American History Museum. It featured work by artists Sharon Chandler Correnty, Ifé Franklin, Stephen Hamilton, Whitney Harris, Ekua Holmes, Perla Mabel, Marla McLeod, Kimberly Love Radcliffe, and Anthony Peyton Young.
Learn more at https://theumbrellaarts.org/weaving
