Black Experience Exhibit Series

 

About our Series

Launching this year, UREC’s Black Experience Exhibit Series features stories that illuminate Black history in the Capital Region and beyond. Designed to travel, the pop-up exhibits move from one community space to the next, ensuring Black history remains visible and accessible. The series aims to inform and inspire, connecting audiences with forgotten narratives that reshape how history is understood today.

Our Approach

Developed in a collective spirit, each exhibit offers students and emerging historians opportunities to collaborate and gain experience in the public history field. By empowering the next generation of history keepers, we carry forward a tradition of resistance through the preservation and interpretation of histories at risk of erasure.

 

 

Our First Exhibit

Working the Waters: Black Mariners on the Hudson River 1800s

Black mariners were a constant presence along nineteenth-century waterways, yet their stories rarely appear in the historical record. Anchored along the Hudson River, this exhibit explores the lives and labor of Black men and women who worked on ships, built communities, and navigated freedom. By centering their experiences, the exhibit invites visitors to reimagine life on the water and the histories that unfolded upon it.

On view now through March 31st at the Pine Hills Branch Library.