Stephen Marc
28
F E AT U R E S
Black
Heritage
Project
nyone who has sat in a classroom struggling
to understand a difficult concept (and who
hasn’t?) until an illustration suddenly, almost
magically, clarified it knows the power of images.
Images help us to understand and to remember.
They attach color, emotion, form and context to
information, anchoring it to keep it from floating
away in the depths of our brain.
With that in mind, after one sees the cutout
photo of Curley Jett standing tall and proud in his
police uniform in front of City Hall — overlaid
with an image of his wife pinning his chief insignia
to his collar — it would be hard to forget that he
was the first African-American Chief of Police in
the history of Williamsport. Similarly, after one
sees the aged family photo of the descendants of
Bishop Joseph Thompson, side-by-side with an
image of the man himself, it would be difficult to
forget that he arrived in Williamsport in 1834 at
the green age of 16 as a runaway slave.
These photos and many other moving digital
collages, were created as a part of the Black
Heritage Project, a collaboration between Lycoming
art professors Lynn Estomin and Michael Darough,
P R E S E R V I N G H I S T O R Y T H R O U G H A R T
Art department
collaborates
with community for
“The Williamsport area black
community has a long and rich
history that is often hidden.”
Lynn Estomin, art professor
By Matthew Parrish ’06
Estomin’s commercial design students,
photographer and digital artist
Stephen Marc, and members of the
local African-American community.
The purpose of the undertaking was
to discover, preserve and remix the
stories and artifacts, memories and
photographs, of Williamsport’s black
culture and history.
The project was not the first time
Estomin and Marc have collaborated
to shine light on buried elements of
Williamsport’s black history. They first worked together ten
years ago, during Marc’s initial stay as a visiting artist at
Lycoming, documenting local Underground Railroad sites
and creating movable billboards. Then Estomin worked
with art alumnus Tom Lee ’99 to create Freedom Bound a
website featuring the stories of Mamie Sweeting Diggs, the
great granddaughter of a local conductor on the Underground
Railroad.
This time around, many fascinating stories were told by
members of the black community and gathered by students.
“I was particularly excited to help Sam Belle ’61, Linda
Jackson and Velna Grimes create their pieces detailing
the history of The Center [now known as Firetree Place],”
Estomin said. “Mr. Belle’s grandmother was one of the
original founders of The Center, which was founded as an
African-American branch of the YWCA because African-
American girls were not allowed to use the facilities of the Y
at that time.”
The Black History Project culminated in an art exhibition
in the expansive Moltz Rotunda Room in the James V. Brown
Library early last year. The opening reception was packed,
filled with professors, students and community members,
young and old alike, pointing and smiling as the images of
cultural pioneers found homes in their memories.
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