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If you’re looking for an unconventional way to explore America’s semiquincentennial, Rockwood Museum near Wilmington might have just the exhibit for you.
Red, white and blue bunting won’t adorn the 19th-century Gothic Revival mansion. Don’t expect a band to be playing patriotic tunes. There won’t be a barbecue or fireworks. Certainly no parade around the lush 72-acre property.
Instead, visitors to Rockwood’s “We the People” exhibit will see new and recent works from five area artists among the heirloom portraits, ornate furnishings, porcelain, photographs and memorabilia collected by the upper-crust Shipley and Bringhurst families, who lived there for nearly a century.
Through Labor Day, the contemporary works from a racially and culturally diverse group of artists have been placed “in direct conversation” with the permanent collections of the estate’s original inhabitants, museum director Ryan Grover said.
New art and old furnishings and household goods are on display in the “We the People” exhibit. (Cris Barrish/WHYY)
Direct conversations, indeed
Artist Alim Smith’s large painting of a Black woman and child on white canvas, which he created using a pair of Nike Air Force 1 sneakers from a secondhand store instead of a brush, dominates the stone wall of the vestibule.
Alim Smith used a pair of old Nike sneakers as a paintbrush in these works. (Cris Barrish/WHYY)
On the grand stairwell, three wildly colorful self-portraits by Wilmington-area native Lauren Peters contrast with three traditional 19th-century portraits.
The one American flag in the exhibit appears in a painting, where its stars and stripes form a Ku Klux Klan hood that a bystander is pulling off.
The only American flag in the exhibit is a Ku Klux Klan mask that is being pulled off in a work by Mikayel Thurin, a Haitian American mixed media and textile artist. (Courtesy of Rockwood Museum)
And that’s how Grover wanted it, to have artists — three Black, one Chinese American and one white — present creations that stand in stark juxtaposition to the work displayed by the families who lived at Rockwood, an English-themed country estate that was built in the 1850s and is also celebrating its 50th anniversary as a museum.
Grover also wanted to showcase work that presents other views of America’s past, present and future on the nation’s 250th anniversary. He noted that the mansion had no Black, Asian or Latino residents, but that some, which the museum refers to as “servants,” worked for the owners in the kitchen, or as maids or groundskeepers.
The exhibit aims to have viewers think of the “servants” who cooked, cleaned and maintained grounds for the upper-crust British residents. (Cris Barrish/WHYY)
“The contemporary artists are bridges for us new audiences, to audiences of today,” Grover told WHYY News during a tour. “But on a level beneath the cover, we’re also trying to find new ways to interpret these old materials. We want to have new stories. We’re looking for new perspectives.”