With additional support from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Minnesota Marine Art Museum is co-hosting a series of national convenings as part of the A Nation Takes Place project, bringing together artists, writers, curators, scholars, community organizers, and art professionals at critical waterways in the United States to further discussion, knowledge sharing, and cultivating networks to address new and emerging scholarship, curatorial practices and artistic expression that centers Indigenous and Black voices within the marine art and maritime genre.
Executive Director Faye Dant provides a guided tour of Jim's Journey: The Huck Finn Freedom Center. Jim’s Journey is the country's first memorial to Jim, the runaway enslaved man who becomes Huck's loyal friend and moral compass in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; the first to pay homage to Jim's prototype Daniel Quarles; and the only African American history museum in Northeast Missouri.
Guided tour of ‘visionary artist, Preston Jackson’s exhibition. Jackson was chosen a 1998 Laureate of the Lincoln Academy of Illinois, the highest honor given to individuals in the State. He is professor emeritus of sculpture at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago.
Welcome By Convening Host, Faye Dant, Executive Director of Jim’s Journey. Introduction to A Nation Takes Place, Scott Pollock, Executive Director of MMAM. Curatorial Vision of A Nation Takes Place, by Shana m. griffin and Tia Simone-Gardner. Featuring presentations by Geoff K. Ward, Professor of African & African American Studies, Director, WashU & Slavery Project and Co-Lead, Memory for the Future, Renée Brummell Franklin Chief Diversity Officer, St. Louis Art Museum Chief Diversity Officer, and Dean Klinkenberg, writer and Mississippi River historian. Followed by a facilitated discussion, led by Matthew Fluharty, Director of Art of the Rural, on how and in what ways organizations advance our understanding of the ways race, water and art intersect in the Americas? Can we unpack what marine art is, and maybe more importantly, what can it be, by centering Black and Indigenous narratives around water?
Pictured: Willie Birch (United States, b. 1941), Looking Towards Algiers, 2017. Charcoal and acrylic on paper. Courtesy of the artist, via MMAM.
2:00 - 7:00pm Central
Jim's Journey: The Huck Finn Freedom Center
509 N 3rd St
Hannibal, MO 63401
Free to attend
Registration required
Spillway
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