Black Land Ownership x I See My Light Shining

This spring, we invited artists to respond to our Elders Project archive, which captures over 200 oral histories with Black, Asian, Caribbean, Indigenous, Hispanic/Latino/a/x, dual-heritage, and queer elders across the United States.

The commissioned artworks are on view at The Bishop Gallery in Brooklyn until our closing on August 31st between 3:00 and 6:00 PM.

The closing show will be feature a talk from Black Land Ownership, a grassroots organization founded by Christopher Banks Carr and Melissa Hunter Gurney to combat historical, systematic and institutionalized marginalization experienced by people of African descent. Black Land Ownership aims to centralize information, identify opportunities and empower Black people to purchase land—specifically in rural areas.

Place and land are central themes in the Elders Project oral history archive. In their interviews, elders discuss their connections to land and water, as well as their experiences with migration, gentrification, and urban renewal.

Chris Carr is also the founder of the Brooklyn Wildlife festival. On Saturday, Carr will engage collaborators Lyle Omolayo and Mercy Tullis-Bukhari in a hip hop and poetry performance.

About I See My Light Shining

The Bishop Gallery, in collaboration with Incite Institute at Columbia University, is pleased to announce the opening of "I See My Light Shining," an evocative exhibition inspired by Jacqueline Woodson’s oral history initiative of the same name. The exhibit opens on August 24th and will run through August 31st.

"I See My Light Shining" was originally developed as an oral history project aimed at capturing and preserving the stories of America’s elders, particularly those from Black and Brown communities. This initiative sought to address the broken historical traditions and untraceable beginnings that have shaped these lives, while also finding anchor points of communal tradition, history, and identity for the global majority.

In this unique collaboration, artists were invited to engage with the oral history archive through an interdisciplinary lens, reshaping these stories using their own languages, logic, and expressions. The result is an exhibition that presents these elders’ life histories as fluid and dynamic sites of power, now preserved and reimagined through artistic expression. The exhibit tethers oral transmissions and visual art, maintaining ancient practices of remembering and representation. It showcases the role of artists as historical interpreters, demonstrating that some memories cannot be merely read but require visual imagination for their full expression and sensemaking.

Like a swell of pride that fills, amplifies, and frees, the artists involved in "I See My Light Shining" have used various media to act as beacons to the project archive. Their works traverse the elders’ oral stories, addressing themes of movement, migration, lineage, and the creation and erasure of generational cultural knowledge. In doing so, the exhibition stretches time and place, connecting past and present experiences that have been interpolated into each other.

"I See My Light Shining" illustrates the power of engagement and the importance of preserving and reanimating the past to give it a new future. Visitors are invited to experience this profound interaction of history, memory, and artistic interpretation at The Bishop Gallery from August 24th to August 31st.

Host or Publisher Baldwin-Emerson Elders Project