Deborah Elmore. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Maybe it’s the cutout of Barack Obama that is a sudden surprise, one eye winking at the City Assessor’s office as the other looks out into the atrium of City Hall. Maybe it’s the swan, plumage marbled in black and white paint, with a beak soaked in bright red. For most passers-by, it’s likely the poem, sentences so small that some readers have to lean in to read each stanza.
All of them are part of From The Out House to the White House, an exhibition from Sisters With A New Attitude (SWANA) Founder Deborah Elmore that currently stands on the first floor of City Hall. As her art makes a home outside a cluster of city offices, Elmore is hoping that it will become a vehicle for teaching Black history—and jumpstart a long-held dream of her own exhibition space.
The display will run at City Hall, 165 Church St., through the end of the month. In February, it travels to the Wilson Branch Library on Washington Avenue, for a now-annual Keepers of the Flame Black History Month event on Feb. 25. The event will also include African drumming and dance, storytelling, foot washing, poetry, and a performance from a Harriett Tubman reenactor.
Elmore's poem celebrating Obama's 2008 election.
“This is just our way of honoring, so people don’t forget where we’ve been and what we’ve been through,” she said last Thursday, in an interview outside the display. “It hurts, you know, for the things they went through. I think that we just have to represent them, to show honor and respect.”
The display arrived at City Hall on the cusp of the New Year, after Elmore connected with Site Projects Director Laura Clarke, and later with City Cultural Affairs Director Adriane Jefferson. For years, she has been growing a collection dedicated to Black history, particularly as it relates to art, poetry, and installation.
Object by object, it grew: yellow-tinted bolls of cotton still on the desiccated stalks, a tree ring with the words Thompson Plantation written in thick black ink, an original poem to Barack and Michelle Obama, a swan with a startlingly red beak. She added cutouts of Barack Obama, the White House, Harriett Tubman, and an outhouse with a crescent mark on its door. Last year, she showed it at a Juneteenth fair on the New Haven Green.
After raising three sons in New Haven’s Hill neighborhood, Elmore said, her mission is twofold. For decades, she has been fascinated by Black history, and realized that her kids—just as she had not—weren’t learning it in school. She knew that if her kids were missing out, so were thousands of others. Beyond the annual event at Wilson, she would like to find a permanent New Haven home for the pieces in her collection, which she tentatively calls a “paper museum.”
“A lot of children, they don’t ever get out of the hood, you know?” she said. “A lot of children, they just don’t make it out. To small eyes, these things look really large. Right now, it’s all in my mind. I’m really hoping to find the space.”
Each part of the display speaks to her differently, she added.
Reached by phone Monday, Jefferson said she was immediately drawn to the project for both its focus on Black history and ability to activate the first-floor space, a large atrium through which people pass on their way to city offices all day long. Other than a Diary Disk from summer 2020 and few posters from the IMatter campaign, a vestige of Mayor Toni Harp’s administration, the walls and floor space are blank.
This year, the Department of Arts, Culture and Tourism plans to work more closely with artists who wish to use the space, including an upcoming exhibition on the life of Venture Smith. So when Elmore came to her, “it was a no-brainer.” Jefferson added that she was excited to see the display go up in a month that is not February, to remind people that every month is Black History Month.
“We were able to come together and make it happen,” she said. “City Hall is the people’s building. We want to create a place and a space that is for that. For the people. I admire her and her vision of cultural preservation and storytelling. I admire the fact that she has put together an exhibition uplifting our narratives and our resilience. I honor that fact.”
Michelle, a city staffer who declined to give her last name and asked not to be photographed, drifted over to the display on her way through the atrium. Since Kwanzaa began the last week of December, she’s walked past it at least a dozen times, while going about her daily tasks.
Thursday, she lingered by the poem, which Elmore wrote following the 2008 election of Barack Obama. Hey eyes rested on an excerpt:
On November 4, 2008 thousands gathered for a moment in time
That would forever count and forever be great!
I witnessed a flood of people
Crying a river of tears.
People of all colors and cultures
United to watch and hear.President Elect Obama!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
were the words that rang in our ears
It was like music
the sweet taste of honey
a mother kissing her baby's tears.
Elmore and City Hall security guard Ty Hopkins, who runs Your Vision LLC. Elmore said that Hopkins was particularly helpful when she was installing the display.
As she watched, Elmore said she is cautiously optimistic for the New Year. Next month, she is hosting a poetry night at the West Haven Library, to ring in Black History Month with written and spoken word. Then on Feb. 25, she and members of SWANA will be at Wilson for Keepers of the Flame. In the library, she said, she plans to spread the display out in the Washington Avenue space, so that attendees spend time with each piece of history.
“I’m praying for good things to happen. I think that there’s gotta be a little more humanity in the world, if I’m using the right word. I think so many people are going through hard times—and for no reason. There’s enough for everybody.”