Romaine McNeil, Tatiana Esh, Sha-Shonna Rogers, Jessica Newby, and Julia Mallory - Slavery in Motion Collection, Baltimore Museum of Art

This is Ashley Newby and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.Today's discussion is with the curator and participating artists in the Slavery in Motion collection (see video of event here), a multimedia collection produced as part of Remains // An Archive, a group gathered under the Diaspora Solidarities Lab. Slavery in Motion was on view through January 8, 2025 at the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture in Charleston, SC. It was inspired by the life of Molia, a young African woman who was sold and lived as a captive in mid-18th century Westmoreland, Jamaica. Molia and other enslaved women and girls in Jamaica are the focus of Remains lab member Jessica Newby’s dissertation research. The four original artworks in the exhibition are by Black women artists from across the diaspora, Romaine McNeil (Kingston, Jamaica), Tatiana Esh (Brooklyn, NY), Sha-Shonna Rogers (Baltimore, MD), and Julia Mallory (Harrisburg, PA), and each convey an aspect of Molia’s life through a variety of visual, poetic, and sonic mediums.