On View: May 12—August 26, 2023
Opening Reception: Friday, May 12 | 7–9pm
Gallery Talk: Friday, May 12 | 8pm | With Curator Amy Galpin, Yady Rivero, Assistant Curator, and Lizzie Jenkins, President, Founder, and CEO of The Real Rosewood Foundation, Inc.
Hannibal Square Heritage Center:
Visiting Exhibition Gallery
642 W New England Ave. | Winter Park, FL 32789
407.539.2680 | HannibalSquareHeritageCenter.org

Organized and curated by Curator Amy Galpin and Yady Rivero, Assistant Curator, Frost Art Museum in Miami, with Florida International University (FIU) Professor M. Alexandra Cornelius.

In commemoration of the 100-year anniversary of the Rosewood Massacre, the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum presented “An Elegy to Rosewood” in early 2023, which will then travel to the Hannibal Square Heritage Center in May as the first stop on its traveling exhibition throughout the state.

The story of the Rosewood Massacre begins with the celebration of the New Year. In January 1923, during a time when Jim Crow laws mandated, encouraged, and protected severe racial discrimination, a white mob descended on the predominantly Black town of Rosewood. This group included members of the KKK who had congregated in Gainesville (50 miles northeast of Rosewood) for a large rally the previous weekend. Responding to a later-dispelled rumor about an assault on a white woman (a common, and usually false, accusation behind many of the era’s lynchings and pogroms), the mob tracked, killed, and permanently displaced the Black residents of Rosewood. State officials suppressed reports of the event, now known as the Rosewood Massacre. Years later, Lizzie Robinson Jenkins clung to the firsthand accounts told by her aunt, a survivor of the massacre, and founded The Real Rosewood Foundation (TRRF) to research and expose the history of Rosewood.

Comprised of photographs and heirlooms from Jenkins’ family, this groundbreaking exhibition explores the Jenkins family story and the way in which it became intertwined—as did those of so many Black families in the South—with the struggle for public recognition of the region’s legacy of white supremacy and state-sanctioned terrorism. Personal artifacts are shown alongside a work by painter and TRRF board member Pedro Jermaine. Because so much of the oral history has been passed down by women, the Frost chose to commission four women artists based in Miami—Rhea Leonard, Charlisa Montrope, Chire Regans, and Tori Scott—to create original works based on the history of Rosewood. This exhibition is part of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Exhibition Series, which addresses issues of race, diversity, social justice, civil rights, and humanity to serve as a catalyst for dialogue and to enrich our community with new perspectives.

To augment this exhibition, personal notes from Lizzie Jenkins’s archival research have been assembled and made available online.

A special website created by the Frost Museum to accompany the exhibition features a virtual reality tour of the exhibition and written reflections from featured contemporary artists. The exhibition includes design projects by FIU Students from Interior Architecture and Landscape Architecture, a collaboration initiated by board member of Real Rosewood Foundation and FIU Professor, Dr. Kalai Mathee.

https://frost.fiu.edu/exhibitions-events/events/2023/01/an-elegy-to-rosewood.html

This Crealdé School of Art visiting exhibition at the Hannibal Square Heritage Center is funded in part by a grant from Orange County Government through the Arts & Cultural Affairs Program.

Funding for this program was provided through a grant from Florida Humanities with funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this (publication) (program) (exhibition) (website) do not necessarily represent those of Florida Humanities or the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Funding for the original exhibition at the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum:
The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum is grateful to the Knight Foundation for its generous support of this exhibition through a Knight Arts Challenge Grant. Funding was also provided by a grant from Florida Humanities and FIU’s College of Communication, Architecture + The Arts (CARTA) and African and African Diaspora Studies.