Fall 2015 + Spring 2016
A Changing Neighborhood
Following our exhibition Made in Church Hill at The Valentine, we spent a full year with a group of students, focusing on how to understand and represent gentrification in Church Hill. We began a sustained partnership with Armstrong High School, one of the nation’s oldest Black high schools. Our students took three tours of Church Hill, each with a very different focus. We traveled to New York City and Houston, where community members have mobilized around issues of neighborhood change. In New York, students took part in a weekend-long workshop with the Tectonic Theater Project on creating oral-history based docudramas.
Together with a graduate class from Virginia Commonwealth University, students made personalized handmade books of the oral history interview transcripts from Made in Church Hill, and presented one to each interviewee. They facilitated poetry-writing about the neighborhood by Armstrong Leadership Program students. Finally, they collectively wrote a docudrama and performed it along with the ALP students.
Project Details
“Will we run or will we fight?
Fighting for our memories,
for our history,
for the love that we share,
for our home.
It’s all in our hands.
To create our own future.”
01
Class
With two semesters to spend with our students, we were able to undertake a number of projects, including a digital exhibition, “Church Hill in Fifty Objects.” We used some of the objects as prompts for a group oral history we undertook with congregants at Fourth Baptist Church, all of whom had grown up in Church Hill.
02
Collaboration
With students in VCU professor Josh Eckhardt’s graduate class on “The Books of Church Hill,” we created books in the Book Arts Studio under the direction of book artists Andrea Kohashi and Jamie Mahoney. Our students became close to their ALP partners through the shared experience of writing, rehearsing and performing. Finally, our students were so incensed by the city’s proposed closure of Armstrong that they joined the ALP students in marching on City Hall. Several students from our class stayed in close touch with the ALP students for years, attending retreats with them and helping them on school cleanups.
03
Docudrama
When we came to Armstrong for our dress rehearsal, we found that the stage was being used for storage, its curtain was torn and dragging on the floor, there was no lighting or sound system in place, and the backstage area was full of boxes jammed with old trophies. This outraged the students, and we decided to make this a focal point of the performance.
The play, performed in front of the stage, raised powerful questions about the impact of gentrification in Church Hill. The dilapidated stage and auditorium became a powerful and visible symbol of the city’s underfunding of this historic Black high school.
04
Community Conversation
The conversation following the performance quickly became heated. When the moderator asked if there were any positive aspects to gentrification, the crowd erupted in anger. Although the audience was composed of both long-term residents and recent arrivals, the latter remained silent as those who felt displaced poured out their rage and sorrow.
