Lauryl Tucker, CfT Co-Director
Last week, we hosted a thinking session with Shelley MacLaren and representatives from the Roberson Project and St. Mark’s community about the rich teaching possibilities around the upcoming exhibition at the University Art Gallery, Art, Storytelling, Creative Placemaking and the Sewanee Black History Trail (October 27–December 11, 2026). This show will highlight anchor projects already underway along the Sewanee Black History Trail— the Cemetery Project, the Sewanee Praises Project at the Kennerly School site, St. Mark’s Grove, and the Swim Pool — while opening space for new creative work that activates the Trail and deepens its connections to the broader community.
The exhibition is designed, from the ground up, as a teaching space. Modeled on the collaborative framework of Action By Design (2022) and Greg Pond’s Highlander Libraries (2020), the gallery will include designated areas for classes to display research and creative projects, room for class visits and facilitated conversations, and flexible stations for screen-based, performance, or hands-on work. The goal is not a static show but a living one, a space that grows and changes as classes engage with it across the semester.
How might your fall course(s) connect to the exhibition and the Trail? The possibilities are deliberately wide open. A class might produce/design “story” markers, such as paving stones, banners, or benches, for installation along the Trail itself. Students might create zines celebrating members of the Sewanee Black community, rewrite entries in Sewanee Places to center Black experience, or develop proposals for gathering spaces along Alabama Avenue. Work could take the form of analytical essays, altered photographs, planning drawings, scripts, creative writing, or something else entirely. Projects contributed to the gallery can go up anytime between October 27 and December 10, and some may be installed directly on the Trail rather than in the gallery — documented in the show through photographs and planning materials.
At its heart, the exhibition asks questions that ring across our curriculum: How do you make a place? What is our responsibility to histories that institutional archives have inadequately preserved? Who tells a given story, how, and for whose purposes? What possibilities do creative projects offer when conventional archival material falls short? These are questions for historians, writers, artists, environmental studies scholars, educators, and theologians alike.You might look into resources to support course planning through the Roberson Project, Archives and Special Collections (maps, the 1916 census, photographs on JSTOR, and the Sewanee Purple archive on DSpace), and secondary sources such as Can I Get A Witness (2014) and Zaire Love’s Making Our Way (2022). Designer Joe Veazey will visit campus in spring 2026 and give a public talk in November.
If you are interested in connecting a fall course to the exhibition, or if you would simply like to learn more, please reach out to Shelley MacLaren at the UAG!