Building a Museum From Below - Sunday January 29 5:30 pm
Visiting Artist Program welcomes Pittsburgh based artist Shaun Slifer.
Join us!
Not a lecture, this presentation will be part of an open discussion. Let’s talk!
Public Erasure and Historical Markers:
Wednesday, February 8, 5:30 pm
Shaun will present and discuss project that he will be working on while here.
The West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, founded in 2015 in the southern West Virginia coalfield town of Matewan, is the first museum devoted to the stories of organized labor and human rights struggles in central Appalachia in the early 1900s which led to the largest armed labor uprising in US history: the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain. Artist Shaun Slifer, who designed and built the exhibits for the museum and now works as the Creative Director, will discuss how the museum came together against the odds, the activism inherent in their mission, the challenges of building an alternative institution in a single-industry-dominated region, and the power of storytelling through objects and artifacts. He'll also present on their new public monument project, Courage in the Hollers, which has so far developed two large-scale permanent monuments to the Battle of Blair Mountain through a deeply community-driven process.