IF YOU WERE BLACK THE GREEN BOOK WAS YOUR GUIDE

PFW gave a first time grant to an interesting NFP Gallery in Cleveland, Ohio called SPACES, which opened in their new home at 2900 Detroit Avenue, this year. www.SPACESgallery.org. This is a dedicated resource and public forum space for creative artists to and experience will feature artworks that touch on issues of local and international significance. Our grant will be used for HAVENS now on exhibition.   This is an installation based on Cleveland locations listed in the Jim-Crow era travel guides known as the ” Green Book”. It was an index of boarding houses, service stations, restaurants, beauty parlors and everything in between that black motorist could SAFELY patronize during their travels. The guarded language of the books themselves points to the precarity of black life everywhere at that time and even today the precarity of black life continues to be a daily reality for too many. The Green Book was published in the 1930’s until the passage of civil right legislation in the 1960’s however; the timeliness of this project cannot be understated. The Havens project will also collect oral stories from those who are left and remember.