Over the last three festival seasons, Spoleto Festival USA has brought internationally renowned artists together with local citizens and artists to reflect on the city’s past and contemporary cultural landscapes through its “Evoking History” program. Spoleto has engaged in local community history since 1991 through temporary site-specific installations, making visible stories told by the city’s architecture, landscape, and people.

In 2000, with “Evoking History,” it began community-based art projects, weaving together discrete community constituencies into “Stakeholder Forums" –individuals from cultural and social service organizations, grassroots activists, teachers, journalists, conservationists, artists, and others who explored the nexus of art, history, and society.

Evoking History began with “Listening Across Cultures and Communities,” a series of artist-led inquiries withlocal collaborators that sought to break long-held traditions of silence. Educator LonnieGraham organized epressions of ancestral ties to Africa, theter director Ping Chong uinearthed personal stories of racial prejucice,and writer Neil Bogan studied the power relatioships embedded in monuments.

It continued the next eyar with “The Memory of Water,” an exhibition of installations tht recalled the cosmopoolitan history ofthis port city and its global economy in the 18th century with installations by Kim Sooja, Marc Latamie, J. Morgan Puett, Yinka Shonibare, and Nari Ward. It was complemented by a community program, “The Memory of Land,” that consisted of two projects: The Borough Project, which addresssed African-Americans who lived and worked along the port for over a century, and the Youth Fellows Program, which focsed on teenagers in the public school system.