24-04-2025
First Look: Bryn Mawr College unveils new art path honoring Black workers
A new art installation recognizing hundreds of Black workers who helped build and run Bryn Mawr College is being unveiled today.
Why it matters: The five-year project, a collaboration with Monument Lab, is a way for the Main Line school to reckon with its history of racism.
The big picture: D.C.-based artist Nekisha Durrett 's installation, "Don't Forget to Remember (Me)," includes 10,000 clay pavers that form a knotted, braided pathway in the Cloisters courtyard near the Old Library, where some of former president and dean Martha Carey Thomas' ashes are interned.
The space has felt fraught for decades for students of color because of Thomas' antisemitic and racist views and public embrace of eugenics, Durrett tells Axios.
The school renamed the library in 2018 after public outcry over Thomas' legacy of exclusionary policies.
Zoom in: The handmade clay pavers are inscribed with the names of 248 Black servants who worked at the college between 1900 and 1930, while other pavers light up, signifying countless unnamed people whose contributions are lost to history.
The soil comes from the old Perry House, a former Black cultural center on campus.
A team of researchers and students pored over the school's archives to identify the workers, Durrett tells Axios.
The intrigue: The length of the trail is the same distance that it took Enid Cook, Bryn Mawr's first Black female graduate, to walk from her off-campus home to the college's center.
What they're saying: Durrett says she was inspired by the braids of a Black guide who led a "Black at Bryn Mawr" campus tour she attended while embarking on the project.
The guide told Durrett she still felt uncomfortable entering the Cloistures, but Durrett wanted to change that by filling the space with a symbol of Black identity and strength — the braid.
"This piece is about reclamation," Durrett tells Axios.
"It's a reminder to look to the ground," Paul Farber, director of Monument Lab, tells Axios, "to see where you are and the layers of time."
