SANCTUARY: Our Sacred Place

Sanctuary: Our Sacred is a cultural documentation project focused on the sacred spaces and spiritual traditions sustaining Black, Caribbean, African diasporic, and immigrant communities in South Florida. Through photography, oral histories, field recordings, video, and ethnographic notes, the project documents how spaces such as churches, botanicas, Vodou temples, mosques, Rastafari gatherings, and Yoruba communities function as centers of healing, cultural preservation, ritual, and memory.

Join us for the exhibition’s opening and the artist’s – Woosler Delisfort’s – homecoming. As part of the opening, we will host a conversation -- Holy Water: Ancestral Memories: Honoring the Middle Passage -- between Dr. Gene Tinnie and Michelle Murray, moderated by Woosler Delisfort.

This dialogue centers on Holy Water: Ancestral Memories, a photo essay featured in the exhibition that documents the annual Juneteenth Middle Passage Remembrance Ceremony at Virginia Key Beach. The conversation will explore the origins of the remembrance ceremony, the significance of gathering at the water’s edge, and the importance of honoring the lives lost during the Maafa and the transatlantic slave trade. It will also examine water as a site of memory, healing, resistance, and ancestral connection.

The conversation begins at 4:00 PM.

This program is presented in partnership with the Haitian Cultural Arts Alliance, The Little Haiti Cultural Complex, City of Miami, the Public Humanities Lab at Florida International University, and The Steven J. Green School of Public and International Affairs.