Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice

2024–2025

Exhibition on view May 23 through October 18, 2025
A glimpse into the living repository of over 150 oral histories that has been collected to tell the global story of how racial slavery and European colonialism were foundational planks of the making of the modern world.
On view at Mystic Seaport Museum April 20, 2024, through April 19, 2026, "Entwined" is the culminating exhibition for the Reimagining New England Histories project centering maritime histories in Indigenous, African, and African-descended worldviews and experiences.

2023-2024

Exhibition on view March 1 through December 11, 2024
Curated by Melaine Ferdinand-King, PhD Candidate in Africana Studies, this exhibition is a creative companion to the biographical “Mumia Abu-Jamal: A Portrait of Mass Incarceration” exhibit at the John Hay Library at Brown University. Inspired by Mumia Abu-Jamal’s 2012 essay, “Art & Incarceration,” this exhibition underscores the significance of creation under crisis.

2022-2023

2020-2022

“All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God Is Change.” – Octavia Estelle Butler Memorial Epitaph, 1947-2006

2019-2020

This year's graduating Fellow for the Study of the Public History of Slavery, Chandra Marshall, used her capstone project to focus on the intersections between African American and Native American histories.
Internationally acclaimed Haitian American sculptor and painter Edouard Duval-Carrié displays a series of resin and plexiglass artworks inspired by the complex histories of the Caribbean, including slavery, migration, colonialism and Afro-religious practices.

2018-2019

Highlights the cooking practices of six Rhode Island families: Alcantara, Aubourg, Malabre, da Graça, Jones, and Powell.
An exhibition of paintings by 2019 Heimark Artist in Residence, Renold Laurent, a Haitian artist based in Boston.
In this exhibition we tell the story of the relationship  between the Black organizing tradition and the movement.  We trace the tradition from the moment of emancipation until the presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson. It is a story not often told, yet it is a necessary one for our times.

2017-2018

2016-2017

Scholars from Brown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice (CSSJ), in collaboration with the Iziko Museums of South Africa, have produced the Singing Freedom Catalogue, a comprehensive educational resource that complements the exhibition "Singing Freedom: Music and the struggle against apartheid."

2015-2016

The shackles, recently acquired by the museum, are of a type used to transport captured Africans to slavery in the Americas, part of the “Middle Passage” of the transatlantic slave trade.
Mali Olatunji is a fine arts photographer from the Caribbean territory of Antigua and Barbuda. His painterly photography is an original aesthetic birth, one that has brought this visual art a new technique and a novel vision.

2014-2015

This is an interactive exhibit that combines a history of chain gangs with modern dance and embodying the stories of others.
The exhibition, Black Experiences at Brown: a Visual Narrative, part of Brown's semiquincentenary celebration is currently on display in the Center’s gallery. This interactive exhibition chronicles the evolution of African Americans at Brown.
This timeline is a living archival document recognizing Black presence at and transformation of Brown University.

2013-2014

2012-2013