In a special summer edition of Talking in the Library, Edwin Wolf 2nd Director Dr. Michael Barsanti speaks with the Director of the Program in African American History, Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens about the powerful new exhibition, From Negro Pasts to Afro-Futures: Black Creative Re-Imaginings, which opened at the Library Company of May 24. From Negro Pasts to Afro-Futures draws upon fragments of early Black Americans’ past from their drawings, love letters, poems, songs, speeches, and protests to help visitors grapple with the place of black creative genius in the quest for a people’s liberation. In this bonus episode, Dr. Barsanti and Dr. Owens discuss the experience of shaping this extraordinary exhibition with five graduate students from Queens College at the City University of New York.

Barsanti and Owens began their conversation by examining a page from an Ethiopian manuscript, The Homilies of Michael, ca. 1682.