RSM Gallery Artist Talk & Reception, Tues. 1/27 | African American Cemeteries: Between Erasure and Restoration

The Bentley University History Department and the RSM Art Gallery are pleased to present African American Cemeteries: Between Erasure and Restoration, photographs and texts by Pauline Peretz and Endika. 

This exhibit and artist talk are part of Bentley University’s MLK Day 2026: Linked in Hope, Purpose, and Achievement. The artist talk is being held at 11:00 a.m. in Smith 304 [visit the MLK 2026 page for details and to register for the talk]. All are invited to attend an opening reception for the exhibit from 5:00-7:00 p.m. in the RSM Art Gallery (registration not required). 

African American Cemeteries: 
Between Erasure and Restoration
Photographs and Texts by Pauline Peretz and Endika
January 27- March 8, 2026

Artist Talk: January 27 at 11:00 a.m. | Smith 304
visit the MLK 2026 page for details and to register for the talk

Opening Reception: January 27, 5:00- 7:00 p.m. | RSM Art Gallery
 

About the Exhibit 

The erasure of African American cemeteries
(Florida, Virginia, Texas, 2022-2023)
Photographs and texts by Pauline Peretz and Endika

Hundreds of African American cemeteries have recently resurfaced across the United States. They have reappeared in unexpected places: in city centers, covered by parking lots, stadiums, gas stations, public housing, and highways. Often, these reappearances were sparked by people searching for their ancestors’ graves.

Some cemeteries were reserved for enslaved people, others for free Black people, and still others African American victims of Jim Crow segregation established in the post-Civil War South. They all sought to provide a place to bury and honor African American dead who were excluded from whites-only cemeteries. These cemeteries should have been protected from encroachment and real estate development. However, over the years, many of these burial grounds have been destroyed by real estate speculation, subjected to vandalism, or overgrown with vegetation. Remnants are at times visible, but urbanization has essentially erased all traces except what remains underground.

The erasure and the resurfacing of these cemeteries help historians better understand African American history and the mechanisms at play in processes of “invisibilization”. The current movement to memorialize these sites is driven both by the 2020 national Black Lives Matter Movement and renewed international attention to mass graves. But each case has its own local specificities. In Florida and Virginia, for example, memory activists, the self-proclaimed guardians of the ancestors, want to make cemeteries reappear in urban landscapes, locating and materializing their boundaries, to tell their stories to visitors.

Memory activists, historians, journalists and archaeologists across the U.S. South have convinced municipalities, government agencies and property owners to support conservation efforts. Since 2022, cemetery memorialization has been federally supported by the African American Burial Grounds Preservation Act, though resources are limited. Protecting these cemeteries has recently become a point of contention in debates on reparations for formerly enslaved peoples; preservation of African American burial grounds can appear as a symbolic gesture for a low cost. Amidst all this, and as the current political and economic environment has begun to turn away from efforts for historic preservation and racial justice, the resurgence and reappropriation of the memory of these places, based on local initiatives, remains fragile.