The Simmons Center creates art platforms for artists and curators to develop a space for debate and discussion around the history of art, black aesthetics, and new forms of African and African diasporic art which draw their inspiration from grappling with the meaning of racial slavery and colonialism and their current afterlives. Learn more about some of these projects below.
Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice
The Simmons Center Arts Initiatives
The Simmons Center creates art platforms for artists and curators to develop a space for debate and discussion around the history of art, black aesthetics, and new forms of African and African diasporic art which draw their inspiration from grappling with the meaning of racial slavery and colonialism and their current afterlives.
The Heimark Artist in Residence program brings to campus musicians, poets, visual artists, and performers whose work grapples with the legacies of slavery on our world today.
The Reimagining New England Histories project (RNEH) aims to foreground the silenced stories of Indigenous and African American experiences of New England. Many rich stories about the complex history of New England remain hidden, oftentimes erased in the conventional dominant narrative histories which are told. The RNEH Artist in Residence explores these themes.
This project, The Imagined New, is an interdisciplinary platform for critical exchange and research around African and African Diasporic art practices, as they relate to questions of history, archive and an alternative imagination(s) of Black aesthetic and curatorial practices. A collaboration between CSSJ and the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre (VIAD), University of Johannesburg.
Visit us in our renovated 19th century house, which includes a gallery exhibition space, the stunning glass wall art piece Rising to Freedom, and a Symbolic Slave Garden.