Black Diaspora Shares Its Story

At Artspace on Monday, as part of the Open Source Festival, artist Allison Minto was on hand to continue her deep dive into New Haven’s Black community, helping people preserve their own familial past while marking a moment of time in the present.

Minto is the artist behind Black New Haven Archive: A Collective Memory Project, which has put the call out to ​“New Haveners of the Black diaspora to photograph and share their story,” an accompanying description reads. The project ​“also supports New Haven families of the Black diaspora in archiving their photographs. Participants learn how to preserve their family’s images and unique history, and are invited to contribute to a collaborative photo book that celebrates Black New Haven life’s past, present, and future.” Minto had already taken her camera, lighting, and backdrop to an event at Stetson Library on Dixwell Avenue recently, where participants had brought family photos and had photos taken of themselves. Minto was now bringing it to Artspace, on the corner of Orange and Crown, to do more.

Minto graduated from Yale’s School of Art in May 2020, and ​“I decided to stay here because I felt like I wasn’t really done with New Haven yet,” she said. She noted that many artists head to either New York or Los Angeles after graduation, but ​“I can make work wherever I am. I don’t necessarily need to be at the hot spot.” Besides, she said, ​“success for me is how I connect with people,” and ​“I wanted to see what I could do and how I could involve myself with the community.” Her own photography practice is about ​“dealing with community. It’s working with archives and Black narratives, and understanding my privilege here, I wanted to see how I could give back,” especially when often, ​“photography is all about ​‘take, take, take.’”

Black New Haven Archives arose from her thinking about family archives — ​“what’s not in the institution,” she said. That is, family photographs, records of life events, and the stories that go along with them, the meaning that families create about their own pasts. ​“For me, that’s why I got into photography in the first place,” she said. As many people put up pictures of family members around their homes, ​“I really see the domestic space as curatorial space.”

Many Black families are doing some form of archival work already. Sometimes that means photographs in a garage or basement. Other times that means photographs preserved in albums, or hanging on the wall. ​“When you look at a family album, when you go into a Black home, when a grandmother decorates her wall, it’s a space for the living and the dead. I’m curious how that looks like for them, and I want to speak more about collective memory, a collective Black experience, and how family is defined.” A family, she explained, could be a parent, or a guardian, or a foster family, or ​“you and your friends.”

Photographs have a role to play in protecting memories — something of great value, as in many Black families, familial memory is ​“fractured,” Minto said. There are ​“ruptures.” They make remembering and documenting the past more difficult, but they’re also ​“a space to let go, to let in, to release.”

Minto’s own grandmother was born and raised in Opelousas, La., one of 14 siblings. She was the first one to leave town, in the 1950s, with Minto’s dad — then a nine-month-old baby — for New York City, as ​“part of the great Southern migration story,” Minto said. ​“But no one talked about it. I was too young at the time to have even known what that meant. It really wasn’t until my grandmother started losing her memory” that the stories had a chance to be preserved. That moment came when it was time to move her grandmother from public housing in New York City into an assisted living facility. Minto rushed to the apartment and ​“I came across all these cassette tapes and photographs, these albums, these letters, all these things.” The cassette tapes were sometimes her grandmother recording her day, sometimes saying prayers, sometimes reciting Bible passages, by the window, the sounds of the street below seeping through.

“I wish she had talked about it more,” Minto added. ​“I wish I would have asked.”

She was thinking about her own family archive, and about greater New Haven, and ​“I thought, ​‘what if I just made a whole photo book of people I’ve met here? Of strangers?” She wants the project to include showing people how to do archival work for their own families, perhaps visiting them at home to do so — while creating a new archive in the form of a portrait book. In that way, she said, ​“I can get to know my community better.”

Preserving photos is ​“about protecting Black stories, and not having them in the wrong hands” — that is, ​“not yours, not your family’s.” She thinks of the photographs of Black families she has seen in an antique shop, disconnected from the people who know what they mean. ​“Throughout history, you see that our stories have been repressed, lost, forgotten, rewritten,” she said. Archival work, preservation and repair, can reclaim that narrative. But ​“what does repair look like? How can we get back to a place of protecting our stories and preserving them?”

That work has a very practical side to it, preserving photographs in binders with archival paper, or hanging photographs in ways that don’t damage them. But there is an emotional, spiritual side to it as well; the goal is ​“healing, repair. An archive is a testimony to how we exist. It’s our testimony. It’s our record of existing here,” Minto said.

Within minutes of speaking to this reporter, Minto was regaled by the voice of Salwa Abdussabur, who entered Artspace with Isaiah Edwards. ​“Hello! I heard the call!” Abdussabur said. ​“Everything to do with New Haven, I’m on it. Especially Black New Haven.”

Minto explained the purpose of the project and her hope to do workshops on how to archive materials properly at home. Abdussabur nodded. ​“Everything about this is brilliant,” she said.

“We should take more agency in our stories,” Minto said.

“Yes! Because we’re in it,” Abdussabur said.

Minto had Abdussabur sign a release form for the portrait she was about to take, which explained, among other things, that the image would only be used for art purposes. Reading the form, Minto discovered that Abdussabur shared a birthday with Minto’s grandmother.

“Universe in alignment!” Abdussabur said.

Minto had Abdussabur hold herself high in the chair and arranged a couple of the folds of her clothing. Then she got behind the camera. Abdussabur explained that her own great-grandmother had migrated to New Haven from South Carolina. ​“My great-grandfather helped build the bridge that goes from New Haven to Lighthouse Point,” she said. She also explained that her family still owns land, a curious relic from the family’s past in slavery. ​“She must have had some kind of relationship with the slave master that he left her the land,” Abdussabur said. As Minto began taking pictures, Abdussabur had time to wonder what her grandchildren might think of the image.

Minto then took a picture with Abdussabur and Edwards together.

Edwards then took his turn in front of the camera solo. Minto decided she liked his earbuds where they were and asked him to keep them in. Edwards explained that his family also had come from the South, and North Carolina specifically. ​“My grandfather and grandmother used to go down to North Carolina just to see where we were from,” he said. Edwards also said that his own curiosity about his family’s past led him to make a documentary about them ​“and why we ended up here. Why New Haven.”

Minto said she would love to meet Edwards’s older relatives and involve them in the project.

“They would eat that up,” Edwards said.

If you are interested in participating in Black New Haven Archive, email [email protected].