southern Futures
An Expanding Archive for Artistic Exchange
We bring artists and performers together with students, faculty, archivists, community leaders, scholars and practitioners in service of an American South that is ethical and just for everyone. To imagine is powerful; to reimagine is transformative.
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The Commons: Southern Futures
The Commons: Southern Futures invited participants to step into and move within currents of grief, joy, and memory through a procession of performances, creative and skills-based workshops, and celebrations occurring across sites of historical and cultural relevance throughout the town of Chapel Hill. Go behind the scenes with this video and hear from two of the Commons curators, Cortland and Otto.
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Omar Scholarship at Carolina
When Omar was still a collection of swirling ideas in Rhiannon Giddens' mind, she and her team reached out to scholars and conducted research to ensure that the opera had a firm historical grounding. The North Carolina premiere of Omar arrived on a campus already awash with rich, related scholarship as many of these scholars work and teach at Carolina.
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Rooted in Research
Rhiannon Giddens is conducting primary-source archival research for the first time as a part of her Southern Futures Research Residency with CPA. Much of Rhiannon's research is focused on interracial relationships around the Reconstruction Era in the United States. In October 2023, Rhiannon hosted a public conversation with Leoneda Inge, WUNC's Race and Southern Cultures Reporter, to share some other findings from Wilson Library's collections.