Past due and on time! The Valentine Museum - use of innovative media to display African American history exhibits, Richmond, Virginia - Advertising Supplement: Virginia

American Visions, June-July, 1994 by Henry Chase

Roll over, Beethoven; rock 'n' roll is here to stay! A generation's passionate commitment to change and to the mind-expanding potential of experimentation and technology is not merely evident in politics, on football fields (where earrings abound), on the police force (where sheriff's deputies in rural South Carolina counties wear gold chains), and in banking (where it's the women bankers' male colleagues who sport ponytails); it has also invaded and transformed the staid world of historical museums. In doing so, it has rescued museums from desuetude and (re-)made American history into what it truly was when it existed as the present: a vibrant and vigorous outpouring of a melange of people in love with life and all its possibilities. Nowhere has this transformation proceeded more dramatically than at Richmond's Valentine Museum, where outdoor projectors, indoor rear-projection screens, and a 12,000-watt, eight-channel "surround sound" audio system rocket one into the past. But it's not merely method that has changed; so has meaning. For the first time, America's past is properly seen as embracing African Americans as subjects rather than objects of history. Rock on!

On the same Clay Street block where slave residents once outnumbered their owner's family, the Valentine, Richmond's superb urban history museum, now addresses the African-American experience in the antebellum South's principal city and provides today's visitors with a comprehensive portrayal of pre-Civil War black and white life. But its latest exhibition, "Shared Spaces, Separate Lives," is only one of the acclaimed aspects of the Valentine, a museum that over the past decade has evolved from a passive and idiosyncratic exhibitor of artifacts into a cutting-edge innovator that uses the latest technology and scholarship to interpret the social history of Richmond.

Building on "In Bondage and Freedom: Antebellum Life in Black Richmond," the Valentine's applauded 1988 exhibition, "Shared Spaces, Separate Lives" considers the 19th-century interplay between African Americans and the whites with whom they sometimes shared residence, worship and places of employment. This exhibition also provides a telling context for the Valentine's Wickham House--a National Historic Landmark built in 1812--16 of whose 31 residents were enslaved. At Wickham, interactive touch-screen video and audio recordings give voice to antebellum African Americans; then the dramatic presentations of the house's 19th-century conversations are recreated for visitors, peopling its spaces for imaginative museumgoers with the separate lives of its original residents.

But the most exciting developments at the Valentine await the 1994 Memorial Day weekend (May 28-30), when the museum inaugurates its new facility at the old Tredegar Iron Works, a historically rich 19th-century industrial factory on the James River that was once crucially dependent on enslaved African-American labor. With Valentine Riverside, the museum boldly steals a leap on the 21st century--and on virtually every other American museum.

In keeping with the Valentine's evocative slogan, "History will never be the same," a highlight of Riverside's high-tech innovation is its dramatic outdoor sound-and-light show. When the sun sets, a "surround sound" audio system kicks on, and the exterior wall of the Tredegar pattern building is transformed into a vast canvas. Synchronized with related sounds, a multidimensional panorama of historic images sweeps across the side of the three-story building: the Civil War battle between the ironclads Monitor and Merrimac, the evacuation of Richmond at the end of that war, the Tredegar foundry at work, and scenes of everyday life and of the lives of significant Richmonders, black and white. "We're creating an emotional, sensory experience that pushes the limits of traditional ways of exploring history," explains Frank Jewell, the Valentine's director.

The Tredegar facility plays directly into the museum's mission of exploring Richmond's true past--a past that includes the city's working-class and African-American heritages. The site's urban history is directly tied to the black laborers who dug the James River and Kanawha Canal system designed by George Washington, which supplied the power that fueled Richmond's antebellum industrial enterprises. The Tredegar Iron Works that subsequently sprang up on the James River was one of America's earliest factories, and it operated with black and white laborers at a time when Richmond was the most industrialized city in the South.

"At Tredegar, we find the most radical experiment with using slaves as industrial workers in the South," explains Valentine historian Gregg Kimball. Tredegar's manager, Joseph Anderson, introduced slaves--who were hired out by their masters--into the most technically demanding and sophisticated industrial work in the iron industry. "In 1847, this prompted a strike by white laborers, who didn't want to give up the secrets of ironworking to slaves," says Kimball. "But Anderson persevered and Tredegar was one of few examples where skilled black iron workers were employed before the Civil War."