This summer, Oak Hill Center for Education and Culture will host a 6-week History Workshop Residency. Working out of the Alternative Press Center Library in East Baltimore’s Midway Community, a group of high school and college students will be invited to work with artists, researchers, organizers, community members, and local historians to uncover and present an alternative history of this Baltimore neighborhood.
Through an interdisciplinary approach that blends community outreach, historical research, critical reflection, and art making, participants will collect the stories of the people both past and present of this community. These stories will be the initial points from which to map a timeline of broader economic, political, and cultural shifts. By placing these personal narratives within a social movement history, we will reveal not only the systematic forces that impact our lives, but how people adapt, resist, and challenge these forces in small and large ways.
Participants will work together to share their “research” through an interactive and multi-media exhibition and publication to take place at the end of the 6 week residency.
“If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.” — Howard Zinn, “A People’s History of the United States”
Oak Hill Center is a collaborative project focused on the intersection of art and culture, education, and human rights. Located at 2239 Kirk Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21218.
Contact us at oakhillcec@gmail.com.