Berman Museum of Art | Winter 2022 Exhibition Teaser

Come experience three new exhibitions on display at the Berman Museum: "A Stirring Song Sung Heroic: African Americans from Slavery to Freedom, 1619 to 1865," "Absent yet Present: A Painterly Dialogue with the Pennsylvania German Collection," and "Immigrant Flora: Rising Under." The Berman Museum is free and open to the public Tues - Sun 11AM - 4PM.

~ "A Stirring Song Sung Heroic" charts William Earle Williams’ decades-long project to make visible crucial sites in the history of the slave trade, the Underground Railroad, the Civil War, and Emancipation that have largely gone unmarked and overlooked. The wooded landscapes, architectures, waterways, and crossroads of Williams’ photographs quietly index locales where struggles over and for bodies, minds, and freedom were wrought—slave markets, plantations, battlefields, military forts, stations along the Underground Railroad, farms of the newly freed—and where, in the artist’s words, “Americans Black and white determined the meaning of freedom.”

~ Carrie Mae Smith’s paintings investigate objecthood and power dynamics of historical utilitarian forms. Smith trains a contemporary eye on objects that enjoyed regular use before becoming part of the museum’s rich Pennsylvania German collection.

~ Drawing on her research on Persian gardens and the history of seed trading along the Silk Road, Behbahani worked with Ursinus students to investigate indigenous and invasive local plants, which informed the imagery for a wall drawing executed in ink and lapis lazuli, a semi-precious stone prized for its vivid hue. In Behbahani’s work, plants serve as surrogates for exiled, displaced, or immigrant communities, and bear witness to border crossings, both literal and figurative.

Filming for this video by Ursinus College Alum Tommy Armstrong '20
Edited by Teddi Caputo '18
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W E B S I T E: ursinus.edu/berman
I N S T A G R A M: @bermanmuseum
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Music by Linanthem - mea culpa - https://thmatc.co/?l=CB51002E