Drawn entirely from the Petrucci Family Foundation’s collection, Tending to the Past brings together 33 works by 22 Black American artists that engage the persistent presence of history in Black cultural memory and futures. These pieces prompt us to consider the possibilities of preservation as an act of memory work, full of discovery and imbued with care, at once both intentional and imaginative.
The exhibition’s title, referencing Lucille Clifton’s poem “i am accused of tending to the past,” signals a view of the past not as fixed, but as something living, cared for, complicated, and growing day by day. Of History, Clifton writes, “she is more human now / learning language everyday / remembering faces, names and dates / when she is strong enough to travel on her own / beware, she will.” With that same spirit, the artists featured here pull from, push against, and play with visual histories, traditions, and forms in ways that defy erasure and static narratives. Across the collection, the past is not only remembered, it is tended to with attention, with grief, with joy, with inquiry, with love.
As a viewer, you’re invited into conversations about stewardship and storytelling. Who creates and tells our histories? What is kept, and by whom? What possibilities emerge when we reclaim memory on our own terms? And how might institutions whose missions center on knowledge discovery, preservation, and access — such as libraries like this one, archives, and museums — work with communities to create and sustain spaces where history, as in Clifton’s poem, becomes a named and nurtured force, living and transformative?
Tending to the Past asks us to sit with the weight of history and the fragility of the record, while also recognizing the radical potential in documenting, imagining, and tending. In the hands of these artists, visual histories become speculative terrain, a space to conjure, commemorate, and remake the past and to shape what is to come.
