Suzanne Lacy, Tumelo Mosaka, Rebecca Chandler, Catherine Braxton, and Theron Snype (Charleston, 2001-2)

The Borough Houses were the focal point for the 2002 show “The Memory of Land” with J. Morgan Puett’s project occupying one of the houses and the other devoted to Lacy’s first Charleston intervention that transformed this house into an installation reuniting former Borough residents and recording their histories in interviews daily during the festival. The Borough Project (named for this section of the Ansonborough neighborhood) was conceived by Suzanne Lacy with curator Tumelo Mosaka and local residents Braxton, Chandler, and Theron Snype, as an installation, an oral history collection point, and a community meeting ground where former residents of Ansonborough “performed” the act of preserving local African American heritage and questioning the politics of its erasure.

The Borough House bcame the first public repository for oral histories and familiy photographs of past Borough residents and was donated to the archieves at the Avery Research Center for African-American History to launch their collection of contemporay histories of Charleston neighborhoods. Through the efforts of community stakeholders, the artists and curators and The Community Foundation staff, The Borough Houses Project (TBHP) is evolving into a community organization that will apply for non-profit status to provide a forum for civic participation through creative action and offer cultural opportunities and address inequities in the Low country.