Happy September and A Re-Introduction

Welcome to September and the final quarter of 2024. It feels surreal that we are so close to 2025 when in so many ways, the world still feels like it’s emerging from life stopping in 2019. But here we are—and here I am, on the precipice of yet another major transition.

Me (right) with Tulani Salahu-Din, NMAAHC museum specialist, on the opening day of our exhibition.

Longtime subscribers may know me as the blogger at Edwardian Promenade, and you’ve probably wondered: what happened to it/her? I didn’t intend to take an extended hiatus when I entered my PhD program in fall 2017. I was so naive to think that I’d get in and get out in five years to return to my old life.

It is seven years later and I am not only finishing my dissertation, but I am moving to Boston to take the position of Chief Curator & Director of Collections at the Museum of African American History, Boston and Nantucket—or MAAH for short. But this comes after spending the past three and a half years in Washington DC, as the inaugural curator of women’s history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC).

I told you that it’s been awhile! 😆

My swan song at NMAAHC was opening the exhibition Forces for Change: Mary McLeod Bethune and Black Women’s Activism. It was an amazing opportunity that I will write more about in future newsletters, and also discuss what it means to tell important stories at a national museum vs a local museum (though I have been told that MAAH is New England’s largest Black history museum!).

The historic Colored cemetery on Nantucket, a ten minute walk away from the Nantucket campus owned by MAAH

But allow me to reintroduce myself. As of today, I am finishing my dissertation on Etta Moten Barnett, a 20th century icon who hosted a radio program discussing global affairs and the civil rights movement in Chicago during the 1950s and 60s. I am also a museum curator, whose decade long career has taken me from the Bay Area to Los Angeles to Chicago to DC and now to Boston. I haven’t quite set my pen down yet, but the past seven years have taught me that history is fundamentally exciting when you center people instead of dates and facts.

With Dr. Michele Cohen, curator of the Architect of the Capitol, and sculptor Nilda Comas, who created this statue for Florida to replace a Confederate general statue.

I had originally intended this newsletter to be an extension of Edwardian Promenade, but I’ve grown beyond that—I look fondly on my youthful excitement over the blog and count it as a formative experience in shaping my curatorial and academic life. I hope to bring several threads of my work into this space to share interesting insights and perspectives about historical events, working in museums, and especially how to create a culture of understanding in the arts and cultural heritage landscape.

Can’t wait to share more of my life with you!

—Angela