Film Screening: The Watermelon Woman

🎥 Film Screening: The Watermelon Woman

📅 Thursday, March 26, 2025 | ⏰ 6:00 PM ET

📍 Museum of African American History – Boston Campus

Join Queer History Boston and the Museum of African American History for a screening of The Watermelon Woman (1996), Cheryl Dunye’s groundbreaking debut and a landmark of New Queer Cinema.

🎞️ About "The Watermelon Woman"

Cheryl Dunye made cinematic history with The Watermelon Woman, the first American feature to be directed by a black lesbian as well as an incisive, humorous critique of classic Hollywood's racist stereotypes.

Dunye plays an eponymous video store employee and burgeoning filmmaker who sets out to make a documentary on the Watermelon Woman (Lisa Marie Bronson), an actress who specialized in "mammy" roles for Hollywood productions of the 30s and 40s. As Cheryl uncovers the Watermelon Woman's identity she not only learns about a secret behind-the-scenes interracial romance but also begins one of her own with Diana (Guinevere Turner), a white woman who arouses the ire of Cheryl's best friend Tamara (Valerie Walker).

A landmark of the New Queer Cinema, The Watermelon Woman testifies to the power of excavating legacies of oppression and in the process creates a progressive legacy of its own.

🎬 About the Conversation: 'Silences in the Archives'

Following the film, stay for a panel discussion featuring Angela T. Tate, Arielle Gray, and Micha Broadnax, moderated by Mik Hamilton.

“Silences in the Archives” refers to the gaps, absences, and distortions in the historical record created when systemic inequities, especially racism, determine whose stories are preserved, whose are marginalized, and whose are never documented at all.

This conversation invites us to think critically and creatively about absence. How do we understand gaps in the record? What responsibilities do archives hold today? And how do we build more inclusive historical futures?

✨ Why You’ll Love This Event:

🎥 Experience a foundational queer film that reimagines the archive.

📚 Hear archivists and historians unpack power, memory, and representation.

🗣️ Engage in conversation about what’s missing and what can still be made visible.

🌈 Connect queer film history with local archival practice.

Angela T. Tate is Chief Curator and Director of Collections at the Museum of African American History, where she oversees curatorial vision, collections stewardship, and interpretive strategy across historic sites. A historian and curator, her work centers Black women’s archives, sound, and performance, with particular attention to how voice, listening, and media shape political consciousness. She is the lead curator of Black Voices of the Revolution, which opened in July 2025, an exhibition foregrounding Black sonic and political life in the age of revolution. Her practice bridges museums, scholarship, and public dialogue, making her work especially resonant in film-based conversations about history, memory, and representation.

Arielle Gray is a writer, artist and native Bostonian. She is a reporter at WBUR, Boston's NPR station, where she's covered Black and brown communities through the lens of history, art and culture for the past eight years.

In 2026, Arielle was the recipient of the inaugural Gwen Ifill Emerging Journalist Award from Simmons University. In 2025, her reporting was published in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s catalogue for their 2025 Allan Crite exhibition. In 2025, she received the Ralph Browne Award from the National Center of Afro American Artists for her community reporting. Her writing and work have appeared in NPR, BBC, the Boston Globe, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, the Boston Art Review and more.

From 2022 to 2024, Arielle was a Luminary artist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and in 2022, she conceived and executed the Future Archive Project, a community audio and photography exhibit highlighting Black LGBTQIA+ individuals in the Boston area. In 2021, she co-curated Combahee's Radical Call, a multi-modal exhibit exploring Black feminism in Boston at the Boston Center for the Arts. She is a 2020 Create Well Fund awardee and a 2021 A4A artist-in-residence at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts.

Micha Broadnax is a memory worker and archival strategist with experience improving access to information in academic, community, and personal repositories. Inspired by Black feminist imaginations and space-making, she pursued the library profession to explore archiving as a practice of care and community building. They are the project manager for the Black Teacher Archive based at Harvard and the audiovisual project director for the SNCC Legacy Project. Micha was a Community Curator Fellow with Queer History Boston in 2021.

Mik Hamilton is Queer History Boston's Archivist. They earned their Master of Library and Information Science in Archives Management from Simmons University. Since 2016, Mik has worked and interned with various archives, including positions at Cornell University, the Smithsonian National Museum for the American Indian, and Harvard University. Mik's research interests include queer organizational histories, local LGBTQ+ grassroots efforts, and reparative archival practices.

Mik earned their BA in Classics and Archaeology at Cornell University. In their spare time, Mik is a bit of a Wikipedia enthusiast. They have facilitated several Wikipedia edit-a-thons and created an instructional LibGuide,Wikipedia for Archivists, which demonstrates how to improve archival discoverability using Wikipedia. When their mind isn’t on archives, they enjoy spending time outdoors with friends, or indoors with their mischievous cat.

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