Rebecca M Beit-Aharon – Public History at UMass Boston

December 18, 2022Rebecca M Beit-Aharon 2 Comments

Internship: Designing for the Public

By Maci Mark.

Over the past few months, I have had the wonderful opportunity to work on my internship project with the National Parks of Boston while also serving as a Seasonal Park Ranger. For this project I have been working with the Digital Humanities and Innovation Team to research, write, and design new waysides for the USS Cassin Young. The goal of this project is to provide more context, interpretation, and connection for the ship for people who do not come aboard (due to restricted mobility or other factors like weather). When coming on board this project I was excited to further develop my skills of writing for the public; this is something that I know is important, as it is often a first impression and is the first chance to help people connect to a historic site. But I was surprised by another skill that I worked to cultivate over the past few months as well: designing for the public.

I had experience in writing for the public in other contexts, writing blog posts for UMass Boston’s University Archives and Special Collections, in my work in Hist 682 Digital Public History, and as an undergraduate student at Gettysburg College working on digital humanities projects there. But writing for waysides was a new to me task, both in how it provides information, the constraints of limited text, but also because of the important role played by design. If it is not eye catching, easy to read, and in an accessible location people are not going to stop and read. The design is a key aspect of a wayside.

I first got the chance to work with design this summer when working on the Tavern Wall we have at Faneuil Hall. Located in the Education Center in the basement of Faneuil Hall, the Tavern Wall is a space where we can anonymously engage with visitors to read their thoughts and reflections. We pose a thematic question, provide background information, and further reading through a QR code if interested. Our Tavern Wall acts similarly to the way that literal tavern walls would have had papers, flyers, and pamphlets posted on them. Literally planks of wood with nails in it for visitors to post their responses to our prompt, it also creates an anonymous forum for engagement.

A photograph of the Tavern Wall, A wooden bulletin board covered with posted papers in the basement of Faneuil Hall. — *The Tavern Wall in the Education Center in the basement of Faneuil Hall. There are numerous responses posted on the wall showing a wide variety of engagement.*
*Photo credit: Maci Mark.*

Tavern Wall prompts and information are generally changed monthly, and when I started my season in May I was given the opportunity to work on the June Tavern Wall and create one for Pride Month. I worked alongside my coworkers to help write the EQ (Essential Question which guided the theme of the wall) and was then given the opportunity to design the wall myself. I strove to create an eye-catching wall that was easy to read and did not overwhelm with information.

A photograph of a poster about Pride Month being laminated. — *The posters are laminated for longevity, one of the final steps in creating the Wall.*
*Photo credit: Maci Mark.*

The Pride Month Tavern Wall ended up with two informational posters about the 1977 Gay and Lesbian Town Hall Meetings that occurred there and posted QR codes so that visitors could read further on the town hall meeting if they were interested. It evolved around the EQ: What does Pride Mean to You? Overall, this Wall was a success with 80+ responses over the three weeks it was up, ranging from all age groups, and varying from a picture of a pride parade to a long paragraph about someone’s journey to coming out.

Working on this Tavern Wall both showed me how meaningful anonymous interactions like this can be, and also the importance of design. Ease of engagement also contributed to the success of this Tavern Wall, as it offered multiple forms of engagement, from reading, to answering, to scanning QR code, to even just reading others responses. I included a rainbow at the top of the posters I designed, to help make it eye-catching and topical, but I also included plenty of pictures of the town hall meetings as well. When walking by the space or checking on the wall I often found visitors reading the signs and reading others’ answers. I learned a lot about design from this project, about the importance of accessibility through easy-to-read language as well as easy-to-read text, via contrast in text and background, and images, which tend to draw people in. Images, especially of the site in the past, tend to draw people in as people love to see what places looked like in the past. The NPS has accessibility standards which guided my practice. After working on this I saw good examples of both good and bad accessible writing everywhere.

A poster about Pride Month and Town Halls. — *One of the posters that was posted for the June Pride Month Tavern Wall.*
*Photo credit: Maci Mark.*

I have had opportunities to work on and assist with two more Tavern Walls over the past few months. And I am taking what I learned about design work over the past few months with me as I enter the final stages of writing and designing the new USS Cassin Young waysides. While waysides are very different from the Tavern Wall, they are similar in providing opportunities for anonymous interaction, establishing connections, and most importantly, providing a first impression.

The lessons I learned about designing for the public can be applied in all my future public history work: the importance of font, coordinating colors, making texts accessible to read, images, and that brevity matters. But most importantly what I have learned over the course of the past few months is how important it is to make information easily accessible whether that is through diving into specific stories with Tavern Walls or through waysides, helping to provide a positive first impressions and provide a deeper understanding of the site.

July 29, 2022Rebecca M Beit-Aharon 1 Comment

Internship: No Such Thing as a Perfect Interview: Artists-in-Residence at Historic Sites, no. 2

By Rebecca Beit-Aharon

Hello again!

In my first post, I talked about the origin of the research project I’m working on, including how we identified artist-in-residence programs at historic sites across the country. Of course, knowing programs exist—or existed—isn’t enough.

As you might have guessed, connecting with the sites we identified had mixed results. In many cases, my supervisor Ken Turino had personal connections thanks to his extensive public history career. I was able to connect directly to a few contacts of my own. In Professor Jane Becker’s public history practicum in Spring 2021, I worked closely with Eric Hansen-Plass of Boston National Historical Park, who confirmed that there hadn’t been an artist-in-residence program there for years. Over the summer, a colleague at the Old North Church clued me in to Ryan Ahlwardt’s song “Granary” about Paul Revere. While not a result of an AIR program, the song and music video are still fantastic examples of public history by a contemporary artist.

While some site administrators did make introductions, I mostly reached out to site personnel cold through emails, phone calls, and contact forms. I was impressed by how many responding staff were interested in our work—the ones that weren’t were generally closed or understaffed due to the pandemic. I’m particularly sorry to have missed out on interviewing staff and artists from Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site, which was closed along with the rest of the Diné (Navajo) Nation due to the pandemic; I was hoping to learn how a site that prioritized Native artists—and functioned under multiple governing bodies—ran an AIR program.

…

We began the interview process by creating two parallel sets of questions: one for artists-in-residence and another for site administrators, curators, and other historic site staff who worked with AIRs. These questions were broken down roughly in terms of the timeline of creating/participating in an AIR program, starting with questions about the genesis of the program, moving on to selecting an artist and the residency itself, and closing out with final products, evaluations, and lessons learned.

Overall, we interviewed twenty-five site administrators and twenty-two artists from twenty-two sites across the country. These sites ranged in size (both physical and budgetary), but there was a notable concentration of sites in the northeast—a huge bulk of our interview sites are in New England or New York. We’re not sure if this actually reflects reality or results from our northeastern network.

A graph showing the number of full-time staff at interviewed historic sites.

Interviewing artists and site administrators—in other words, growing my network!—was a pleasure. I love talking to people about both art and history, so learning about that in tandem both practically and creatively was a joy.

While there’s no such thing as a perfect interview, certain practices helped them go smoothly. As a stickler for structure, I generally sent the interview questions in advance and followed them closely. While a more conversational style would have been more natural, I didn’t want to miss any questions. No one I spoke to had answers to every question, whether because some weren’t relevant or because institutional knowledge had been lost over time. My notes, at least, were extremely easy to organize and analyze once we hit the data analysis phase.

I spoke to people from all sorts of sites, and I ended up interviewing just about all of the artists and administrators we spoke to connected to the National Park Service. As a government institution, there are more regulations to deal with, but some of the near-universal traits of NPS AIR programs were, frankly, mind-boggling. For example, a much higher percentage of NPS sites treat AIRs as volunteers than other historic sites do (and seem almost surprised that one might pay an AIR). There’s also a clause in very fine print on the NPS volunteer contract that gives the government rights to any artwork/etc created while volunteering.

The AIR-as-volunteer model has serious drawbacks. Unpaid artists must donate not only their work but their valuable time, and only artists with enough disposable income—which leaves out a significant portion of artists, particularly emerging artists and economically disadvantaged artists—can realistically participate. By not paying the artists, these sites reinforce the notion that art is not a proper profession: as one artist pointed out, sites pay professionals to restore woodwork, artwork, and more, and they pay them at professional rates. Not paying (and underpaying) artists devalues their valuable work. Sites lose out too. Minority artists are more likely to be economically disadvantaged. One of the benefits of AIR programs is their ability to bring new eyes to historic sites traditionally interpreted with narrow lenses. Minority voices are vital to expanding the stories told, and AIR programs are one way to reimagine sites, as Historic New England did with the portrait of Cyrus Bruce by Richard Haynes Jr. that I wrote about previously.

New Bedford Whaling National Historic Park’s AIR program provides a notable exception to this apparent “rule.” Here, the program is run by historic-site-AIR superstar Lindsay E. Compton, who created AIR programs at two other NPS sites: Congaree National Park and San Antonio Mission National Historical Site. New Bedford Whaling NHP provides an incredible example of a robust AIR program that pays its artists, taps into their community’s talent, and creates programming and art that speaks to varying and deep themes at the site and in the community. The current (when I interviewed Lindsay) artist-in-residence was doing a project on Polynesian women in whaling. Lindsay did in depth research to support the artist. For a more community-based example, April Jakubec, the AIR from January-March 2020, created four large portraits of women in the community who self-identified as having mental illness/struggles, sparking rich discussions around mental health. As an attached workshop, women were invited to paint a self-portrait and adorn the art with flowers, gems, and more to demonstrate different areas of healing (i.e. flowers over mouth: someone felt silenced).

A ground of women stand and kneel with painted self-portraits, many adorned with painted plants or flowers. — *April Jakubec’s AIR workshop in 2020. Courtesy of New Bedford Whaling National Historic Park.*

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Check back for the final installment, where I’ll talk about data analysis, preparing a panel agenda, and presenting at conferences for NEMA, Connecticut Local History Organization, and AASLH.

July 28, 2022Rebecca M Beit-Aharon 1 Comment

The People’s Congressman: Joe Moakley’s Mission for Peace and Justice in El Salvador

By Laura Kintz

My name is Laura Kintz, and I designed an Omeka site, THE PEOPLE’S CONGRESSMAN: JOE MOAKLEY’S MISSION FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE IN EL SALVADOR, as my capstone project for the Archives Track of UMass Boston’s History MA program.

The goal of my site is to display and contextualize archival materials that document Congressman John Joseph Moakley’s important work related to issues in El Salvador during that country’s civil war from 1979 to 1992, especially his career-defining leadership of the “Moakley Commission:” a congressional task force that investigated the 1989 murders of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter. This project reflects my interests in both 20^th century American history and issues of archival access.

Congressman Moakley (1927-2001) was a Democratic South Boston politician whose career spanned the second half of the twentieth century. His papers are at Suffolk University in Boston, which is both my alma mater (BS in History, 2006) and Moakley’s (JD, 1956). The John Joseph Moakley Archive and Institute (JJMAI) at Suffolk University has digitized thousands of Moakley Papers documents, including hundreds relating to El Salvador, for use by off-site researchers; these are accessible via their online catalog. Fifteen years after his death, though, Moakley’s work related to El Salvador remains largely unknown. With one exception (Moakley’s biographer, Mark Schneider), historians have largely ignored Moakley and his career as historical subjects. The wealth of materials available in the Moakley Papers begs for further research, and thus far, no one has mined these materials and presented them digitally in a cohesive way. My goal in creating a digital exhibit is to change that. The site allows historical researchers and members of the general public to learn about a politician who worked tirelessly to help the victims of Salvadoran injustice.

This site includes a short sketch of Congressman Moakley’s life and career, as well as a timeline of El Salvador’s history, with a focus on the years of the civil war. The “Archival Materials” section comprises the bulk of the exhibit; it features correspondence, memoranda, press releases, government documents, reports, photographs, and other pieces of evidence that chronicle Moakley’s introduction to El Salvador; immigration reform; the 1989 Jesuit Murders and the Moakley Commission; the end of the civil war; and Moakley’s legacy. An “Oral History” section includes transcripts of interviews with Moakley’s family, friends, colleagues, and even with Moakley himself. A final section includes a bibliography and notes on copyright.

In crafting my site, I had nearly 500 digitized archival documents at my disposal. These represent only a small portion of the total number of documents in the Moakley Papers, but nonetheless provide significant insight into Moakley’s career. I selected documents that best support the overall narrative of Moakley’s work and then divided them into categories that reflect the general trajectory of this work. The narrative contextualizes the documents, but the documents also speak for themselves. Each document has its own accompanying identifying information, or metadata, that provides further details, including a general description of the document. In some instances, for presentation purposes, I have divided multi-page documents into separate PDFs; I have noted these instances in the metadata for the relevant files.

My work on the site aligns with my main goal as an archivist, which is to uncover history by providing access to primary sources.The complicated nature of Moakley’s work and of El Salvador’s history in general made this process challenging at times. Given these complexities and my desire to present the material in a succinct and readable way, there are certain aspects of Moakley’s work and El Salvador’s history that this site does not cover. The primary source documents that I have contextualized nonetheless illuminate the unceasing efforts of a United States congressman whose commitment to human rights in El Salvador defined his career and is an example to citizens of today’s world, politicians and civilians alike.

I would like to the staff, past and present, of the Moakley Archive and Institute for all the wonderful work they have done to digitize Congressman Moakley’s papers. This project would not exist without their commitment to providing access to their materials. I would especially like to thank archivist Julia Howington, whose advice and assistance were invaluable as I worked on this digital exhibit.

I would also like to give very special thanks to my advisor and mentor, UMass Boston Archives Program Director, Dr. Marilyn Morgan. Without Dr. Morgan’s encouragement, I may not have realized that archives are my true calling. Dr. Morgan’s support not only helped me create this exhibit, but also helped me learn how to be an archivist, and for that, I am immensely grateful.

Finally, I would like to thank my family, friends, and fellow students for all of their support during my graduate career. I would like to dedicate this exhibit to my husband, Rob Kintz, without whom I never would have been able to start, let alone finish, graduate school. He has always believed in me, and for that, I cannot thank him enough.

July 28, 2022Rebecca M Beit-Aharon 1 Comment

A Curatorial Tagging Case Study of the Blackwell Family Papers Digital Collection; Or, Making the Case For Archival Performance Transparency

By Katie Fortier

My capstone project uses the Blackwell Family Papers Digital Collection (BFPDC) as a lens through which to examine issues of archival performance transparency or pertinent contextual information that could enhance access points to digital collections.

Archivists have traditionally viewed themselves and their institutions as objective and impartial presenters of documents. In more recent decades, some have debated the agency and mediation that they practice in their profession, in terms of appraising, arranging, and describing archival records. Some have pushed the debate further, arguing that archival users should be more involved in these processes, particularly by generating descriptive metadata, as a complement or alternative to traditional taxonomies and controlled vocabularies, which some archivists have more recently scrutinized.

Philosophical discussions revolving around archival transparency address several issues; for instance, what are the means by which archivists explicitly outline their archival decisions and intentions? What role do archives play in constructing cultural memory and power? Can providing additional contextual information about archival methodologies prove useful to researchers? Can including additional context prove beneficial to archivists themselves by serving as an administrative tool? Lastly, and perhaps most difficult to assess, when instituting new practices, like tagging digital collections to enhance transparency and accessibility, is it possible for an archivist to consciously document his or her own biases?

In 2012, Schlesinger Library initiated a tagging project to enhance access and create new pathways between records in the extensive collection that had been fully digitized in 2014. The process and challenges encountered in tagging the BFPDC—inconsistency, the lack of objectivity, and the uneven distribution of curatorial tagging—provide insight into social experiments in archival description. Creating and applying tags to provide contextual information aptly highlights issues related to descriptive practices in general. My capstone outlines the type of information that the project generated and attempts to evaluate its usefulness. It also highlights the anxieties of tagging in this fashion in light of postmodern theory and its application to archival theory, particularly archival description. It argues for the transparency of descriptive practices as a means of communicating to users important contextual information about the custodial history of archival records, including trying to articulate the combinations of different methodologies with which archivists applied curatorial tags. It finally produces several decision-making documents that one might feature on their digital online collections, to aid researchers in understanding the way in which they are seeing digital materials.

Within the past 20 years, several archivists have made calls for contextual documentation of manuscript collections but a nomenclature for this action has yet to be standardized. My capstone uses the term archival performance transparency to describe a document or a set of documents that relay, explicitly, information outlining one, some, or all of these processes: custodial history of records; appraisal, processing, and descriptive decision-making (of the archivist and/or the repository); documentation strategies; archival methodologies; and personal or institutional biases. Archival performance transparency derives from the work of Terry Cook and Joan M. Schwartz who insist that “the archivist is an actor, not a guardian; a performer, not a custodian.” Archival performance transparency entails providing contextual information related to collections; it does not relate to discussions regarding the transparency of organizations and citizens’ abilities to access records.

My capstone builds upon the work of Michelle Light and Tom Hyry who, in 2002, appropriated the term colophon for the field of archives. The finding aid colophon, serving as an addition tacked onto a finding aid, translates into words the inevitable subjectivity of the archivist’s choices when making appraisal and processing decisions. At present, few, if any, archives or repositories have put the idea of a finding aid colophon into practice. My capstone proposes a reimagining of the colophon for the digital collections environment; an environment where digital records often suffer from lack of context. Using the Blackwell Family Papers Digital Collections as a case study, my project argues that the transmission of records from its original finding aid to its representation in an online digital collection environment necessitates the creation of a series of digital collection essays. Digital collection essays can be defined as archival performance transparency tools to be applied to an online digital collection that describe the transmission and representation of digital archival records. These essays integrate archival performance transparency as well as educational and navigational information to breathe new life into the archival colophon.

April 19, 2021Rebecca M Beit-Aharon No Comments

Internship: “Ways We Couldn’t Even Imagine”: Artists-in-Residence at Historic Sites, no. 1

By Rebecca Beit-Aharon

Public History student Rebecca Beit-Aharon offers the first of a series of three blog posts reflecting on her internship experience.

A framed crayon portrait of a faceless Black man in fashionable 18th century clothing standing at an open door. — “Cyrus Bruce” by Richard Haynes Jr. is currently on display at Historic New England’s Eustis Estate in Milton, MA in “Artful Stories: Paintings from Historic New England.” Image courtesy Historic New England.

In Summer 2018, Historic New England’s Governor John Langdon House in Portsmouth, NH and the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail invited artist Richard Haynes Jr. to make an invisible man visible. Haynes served as Langdon’s artist-in-residence to create a portrait of Cyrus Bruce, a formerly enslaved Black man with a “gentlemanly appearance” who worked for Governor Langdon in the late 1700s. Haynes studied written sources, historical artifacts, and the Langdon House itself to bring Bruce to life.¹

Before and after, the Langdon House has brought in other artists-in-residence. The success of Haynes’ residency showed just how powerful contemporary art at historic sites can be: the Langdon House found a community partner in the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail; a previously hidden history has been revealed; and bringing in a Black artist to showcase a Black historic figure increased its modern diversity as well. Ken Turino, Manager of Community Partnerships and Resource Development at Historic New England, was particularly impressed.

AIR programs at historic sites aren’t new or particularly uncommon, but there’s surprisingly little information available about actually running one. Different sites will naturally have different needs and capabilities, but the state of the field so far has generally been that each site ends up reinventing the wheel—with varying degrees of success.

In this display in Mining the Museum, “Metalwork 1793–1880,” Wilson places a silver service with iron slave shackles. The wealth of white Marylanders who owned such silver services depended on the enslavement of Black Africans and African-Americans. Image courtesy Fred Wilson and Howard Halle, “Mining the Museum,” Grand Street, no. 44 (1993): 157.

I started working with Ken Turino in August 2020 as a Community Engagement Research Intern to research existing and former AIR programs at historic sites with the goal of creating a set of industry best practices. We’ll be presenting our findings at at least one industry conference (AASLH 2021, here we come! Our panel will be on Friday, September 24 from 11am–12:15pm); making our materials—sample contracts, e.g.—available to the public; and (hopefully) submitting our findings for publication.

My background reading began with Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum, an arresting 1992–93 exhibit at the Maryland Historical Society. Mining the Museum swept the industry with its curatorial critique of the museum’s dominant narrative. Rather than maintain the veneer of separation in the regular collection, Wilson juxtaposed artifacts reflecting upper-class white history with their antecedent: artifacts of enslavement.² His exhibit exemplifies what AIR programs can do: bring untold stories to light, incorporate diverse voices into historic sites and museums, and push historic institutions to rethink how they tell history.

A photograph of wooden statues of a cluster of Black children in front of church pews. — “The Children of Whitney” by Woodrow Nash. Courtesy of Whitney Plantation Museum.

Public historians today continue to echo Wilson’s message as we reframe history at sites like the Whitney Plantation and Slave Museum in Edgard, LA. Visitors’ introduction to the plantation and slave museum is through contemporary art in a historic building: sculptor Woodrow Nash’s “The Children of Whitney” grabs your attention when you enter the restored 1870 Antioch Baptist Church, built by emancipated African-Americans in nearby Paulina, LA after the Civil War.³ “The Children of Whitney” represent real Black children at the time of emancipation through the work of a Black artist, giving multiple generations voice.

Of course, not all AIR programs are equally successful: The Cut, a 2015 week-long public excavation at the site of the Warsaw ghetto run by Turkish artist-in-residence Aslı Çavuşoğlu at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, has had no lasting impact. In a 2020 review, Maria Magdalena Dembek argues that The Cut failed to evoke a shift in perspective among audience members or encourage an evaluation of its host museum’s narrative. POLIN actively leans away from interpreting the Holocaust, instead focusing on the life of Polish Jews—perhaps, as Dembek suggests, to “avoid critical discussion of the cultural mechanisms behind the Holocaust, mainly anti-Semitism in its local, Polish variant.”⁴ Despite the facts that Çavuşoğlu’s work was directly located in and conducted by the community and that he needed POLIN’s support to conduct his project at all, The Cut seems to have existed in a vacuum. Çavuşoğlu’s project was thoughtful and promising, but at the end of the day, a blip is a blip.

“Sheep Is Life” by JoAnne Doshier, 2008 Artist-in-Residence at Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site. Watercolor on paper. Courtesy of NPS.

POLIN in Poland, MHS in Maryland—historic sites run AIR programs around the globe, but as English-speaking Americans, Ken and I have tended to focus on American historic sites. Of the fifty-five relevant programs that we initially identified, fifty-one are in the United States. One major source of AIR programs was the National Park Service, though the interactive map listing their AIR programs is woefully out-of-date. The map lists programs that current employees have never heard of, such as at Boston National Historic Park, and omits many current programs, including Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site in Apache County, AZ, which has run its AIR program on a limited basis since 2007.⁵ And I only looked at the historic sites on the map—never mind the non-historic ones!

The NPS’ unhelpful masterlist is illustrative of two larger issues for AIR programs at historic sites: public awareness and confusion. AIR programs are often under-advertised; sometimes, opportunities are only posted on the site’s website, meaning that only artists aware of an individual site (and AIR programs in general) have a chance of knowing where to look. Additionally, “artist-in-residence” means multiple things. Our research focuses on AIR programs where the artwork and the artistic process is engages with the site of the residency, but there are other similarly-named programs—historically called artist colonies, a term currently being retired throughout the industry—that serve as retreats for artists to create without engaging with the host site. Not only is this difference poorly explained in available literature, but I haven’t found anywhere that treats them as separate types of programs. Even within the NPS, both types of programs are advertised under the same name (artist-in-residence program) with no way to distinguish them beyond looking at each individual site webpage.⁶ The same holds true on the Alliance of Artists Communities website, the biggest online clearing house for AIR programs.⁷ Clarity, communication, and openness are important first steps for historic sites with AIR programs, a finding continuously reinforced in the next phase of research: interviews.

Check back for the next installment, where I’ll talk about interviewing artists and site administrators—and more lessons learned.

Footnotes

1. “Video: How Richard Haynes creates a portrait,” Historic New England, August 14, 2020, https://www.historicnewengland.org/how-richard-haynes-creates-a-portrait/

2. Fred Wilson and Howard Halle, “Mining the Museum,” Grand Street, no. 44 (1993): 151–72, accessed August 5, 2020, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25007622; and Noralee Frankel, “Review: Mining the Museum by Fred Wilson,” The Public Historian 15, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 105–108, accessed August 5, 2020, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3378741.

3. Jessica Marie Johnson, “Time, Space, and Memory at Whitney Plantation,” Black Perspectives (blog), African American Intellectual History Society, March 14, 2015, https://www.aaihs.org/time-space-and-memory-at-the-whitney-plantation/; “The Children of the Whitney,” Whitney Plantation, accessed April 12, 2021, https://www.whitneyplantation.org/history/the-big-house-and-the-outbuildings/the-children-of-the-whitney; “The Antioch Baptist Church,” Whitney Plantation, accessed April 12, 2021, https://www.whitneyplantation.org/history/the-big-house-and-the-outbuildings/the-antioch-baptist-church.

4. Maria Magdalena Dembek, “Archaeological fever: situating participatory art in the rubble of the Warsaw ghetto,” Holocaust Studies 26, no. 2 (2020): 202, accessed August 5, 2020, https://doi-org.ezproxy.lib.umb.edu/10.1080/17504902.2019.1578458.

5. “Be an Artist-in-Residence,” Arts in the Parks, National Park Service, accessed April 11, 2021, https://www.nps.gov/subjects/arts/air.htm; “Artist in Residence,” Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site, National Park Service, accessed April 11, 2021, https://www.nps.gov/hutr/getinvolved/artist-in-residence.htm.

6. Eugene O’Neill National Historic Site’s Travis Bogard Artist in Residence Program in Danville, CA is a performing arts residency where the works produced do not need to be related to the site; on the other hand, Harpers Ferry National Historic Park’s AIR program in Harpers Ferry, WV requires artists to create work relevant to the site. See “Travis Bogard Artist in Residence Program & Travis Bogard Day-Use Program,” Eugene O’Neill Foundation, accessed April 11, 2021, http://www.eugeneoneill.org/artist-in-residence-program; “Artist in Residence,” Harpers Ferry National Historic Park, National Park Service, accessed April 11, 2021, https://www.nps.gov/hafe/getinvolved/artist-in-residence.htm.

7. “Residencies,” Alliance of Artists Communities, accessed April 11, 2021, https://artistcommunities.org.