A group of graduate students at the Rhode Island School of Design has created a design project and research database examining majority-black neighborhoods that were destroyed in the 19th century.
Students will use evidence of life, such as newspaper articles and other found materials, discovered in the Snowtown district of historic Providence, Rhode Island, which was destroyed by a racist mob in 1831. I spent a semester dedicated to founding the Leverage Archive and establishing ways of perpetuating forgotten architecture.
Marissa Brown, associate director of the Center for Complexity at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), directed the Snowtown project, which grew out of another course at RISD called Art and Design as Community Practice. The students worked with a local group called the Snowtown Research Collective to complete the project.
Students will delve into manuscript collections, historical maps, real estate records, state and federal census records, newspaper clippings, and artifacts to create collections of images, zines, and digital 3D models that represent the culture of their neighborhood. is completed. It has been all but erased from the historical record.
Three of the students, Tian Tian, Connie Cheng, and Ben Roland, worked together to create a digital 3D model of some of Snowtown’s known buildings, using existing geographic data and photo clippings. Developed.

Nina Martinez, a student participant who created the postcards, said, “I noticed that Snow Town was often mentioned in the context of crime-infested areas or run-down places that needed to be demolished, renovated, or rebuilt.” said student participant Nina Martinez.
“So we tried to put an illustration of Snowdown on postcards. It was a way to signal and let people know that we had passed through this place in American history. We wanted to give Snowtown the same treatment. thought.”

Martinez’s postcards, which are based on newspaper clippings, feature holes in the shape of moons and stars to indicate “gaps of silence.”
“There is so little information about Snowtown that we have this kind of archival silence. The stars and the moon appear in the sky on a postcard, just like when people hold up a postcard and the light shines in. “I cut a hole in it,” she said.
Much of the information contained in the Snowtown Archive is a direct result of the collaborative research efforts of the Snowtown Project. The study began in 2019 when his 30 researchers were invited by the Rhode Island State Legislature to specifically work on finding and documenting information about Snowtown.
As an unfunded volunteer project, the members of this collective are interdisciplinary and constantly in flux, creating a body of archival research through their interdisciplinary expertise.
“For a very long time, the established narrative of Snowtown’s history was limited to the Snowtown Riots of 1831,” says team member and archivist Kate Wells.
“Snowtown has existed in various forms for almost 100 years, and our goal is to document and contextualize the neighborhood and its residents in a more comprehensive and nuanced way.”
“We know that it will take years to uncover the story of Snowtown, and that our interpretations will be continually developed, revised, and rewritten as we learn more. We believe it is iterative and open to community dialogue.”

Historically, the Snowtown people were a population that resulted from the growth of Rhode Island brought about by the Triangular Slave Trade after the American Revolution. By the 1930s, the population exceeded 16,000, including enslaved men, women, and children, as well as free people of color.
“I think this work itself, like the historical work about Snowtown, is about spatial justice for me,” Brown said.
“It includes not only public art but also public design: how the public landscape comes into being, who can and cannot shape it in terms of commemoration, and how we The stories that are elevated and the stories that are excluded are very important.” “I’m critical of the field of preservation, and I see this project as falling under that umbrella of work content.”
Other projects examining the erasure of Black identity and infrastructure through the lens of design include the 2021 exhibition “Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America” at MoMA;
Image courtesy of RISD.