About This Exhibition

Samantha Hill in the Johnson Publishing Company Archive exhibit at the Stony Arts Bank
Photographer: Tony Smith

Framing Identity: Representations of Empowerment and Resilience within the Black Experience is a curatorial project developed by Samantha Hill, 2019 – 2021 Joyce Bonk Fellow at the William L. Clements Library and graduate student at the University of Michigan School of Information. She received her Masters of Fine Arts in 2010 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  Hill works as an artist and educator to produce archive-based exhibits, educational projects, and presentations for academic and cultural institutions, including the Anchorage Museum, the Block Museum at Northwestern University, Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College, and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture at the University of Chicago.  She is also the creator of the Kinship Project, a community archive of photographs and artifacts from African American families dated between 1839 to 2012.  Hill’s creative work is featured in the book Problematizing Public Pedagogy published by Routledge Press.

Unless otherwise noted, all photographs are from the David V. Tinder Collection of Michigan Photography, William L. Clements Library, The University of Michigan. The majority portion donated by David B. Walters in honor of Harold L. Walters, UM class of 1947 and Marilyn S. Walters, UM class of 1950.

A special thanks and acknowledgement to Clayton Lewis, Paul Erickson, Emiko Hastings, Louis Miller, and Oksana Linda for all of your assistance, conversations and advice during the development of this project.