Conceptualized by scholar curator Dr. Lucy Mensah, whose work integrates African American literature and visual culture with museum practice, Still Here: Linking Histories of Displacement centers the histories of Indigenous peoples and African American communities who were displaced from the land now occupied by the National Public Housing Museum in Zhegagoynak, what is called modern day Chicago. It highlights the specific impacts of the 1821 Treaty of Chicago, the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis, and the 1795 Treaty of Greenville on Indigenous peoples, as well as the lasting effects of redlining and public housing demolition on Black families. Through artistic and archival work, the exhibition reveals how these communities’ experiences of dispossession are interconnected and still resonate today. “I’ve always been interested in how place and space inform subjectivity, and how the denial of certain safe places – what we would contextualize as home – affects the individual. What does the absence of home do for an individual who was exploring or trying to think about the relationship between their identity and their ability to express identity materially in a given space?” asks Mensah. What is striking about Still Here is the intentional way it braids together the histories of Black and Indigenous displacement in Chicago not as a juxtaposition of narratives, but as an invitation to see the shared logics of erasure, survival, and memory that undergird these experiences.
At its core, Still Here is a curatorial project animated by a deep reckoning with the precarity of housing and belonging in Chicago. Conceived through early conversations between Mensah and Lisa Yun Lee, Executive Director of the National Public Housing Museum, the exhibition responds to the long histories and present realities of forced displacement that have shaped the city, especially for Indigenous and Black communities. The question of what it means to be at home under conditions of structural instability became the philosophical anchor for the show.
The Near West Side, where the National Public Housing Museum is located, is a historically significant site for understanding housing insecurity in Chicago. Originally home to various immigrant communities in the 19th and early 20th centuries, including Irish, Italian, Jewish, and later Mexican communities, the area saw dramatic transformation through waves of urban renewal, redlining, and public housing development. The creation of the Jane Addams Homes was initially hailed as a solution for working-class families. Built in 1938 as one of the first federally funded public housing developments, the Jane Addams Homes initially aimed to provide dignified housing for working-class residents. But this promise quickly dissolved as the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) subjected the area to years of underfunding, racial segregation, and neglect. The CHA and city planners consistently reinforced patterns of racial exclusion, placing the majority of Black public housing residents in segregated areas, far from economic opportunity and political power. Families, predominantly Black and Indigenous, lived in constant precariousness and faced both physical disrepair and institutional erasure.
The Jane Addams Homes were part of this larger system. Over time, CHA policies of disrepair and disinvestment, coupled with increased policing and surveillance of public housing residents, contributed to what many scholars describe as “planned neglect,” a tactic that justified later demolition under HOPE VI and other federal programs. This process of planned neglect and the later demolition of public housing embodied a systemic refusal to recognize Black and Indigenous residents as part of the city’s future. This is a history that has not only shaped the Near West Side but continues to echo across Chicago today.
Dr. Mensah brought to this project her prior work at the Detroit Institute of Arts, where she co-curated Making Home, an exhibition exploring artistic responses to place, space, and identity in Detroit. In Chicago, this inquiry took on new urgency as she began to research the layered histories of dispossession, from the city’s erasure of Indigenous land claims to the racialized disinvestment and demolition of Black public housing. The project’s conceptual grounding – framing housing insecurity not only as an issue of shelter, but also as a form of erasure – reflects a commitment to foregrounding those who have been most affected by these systemic displacements. In Still Here, displacement becomes not just a denial of space, but also a denial of identity, memory, and the imagined future of a city.
The exhibition’s participatory approach to collective land acknowledgment reflects this ethos. One of the objectives of the exhibition was to get feedback from the community about what a land acknowledgement means. Rather than presenting a static acknowledgment, Still Here integrates community engagement through interactive stations, inviting visitors to reckon with Chicago’s legacy of dispossession. As Mensah notes, Lee was intentional about steering away from the top-down model often used by institutions; instead, “her objective was to get Chicago’s community involved and active in developing a land acknowledgement that not only pulled from the history of the displacement of Indigenous people in Chicago, but also explored the cross-section of different groups experiencing displacement in a way that cannot be divided from the experience of displacement that other communities are exploring.” Through interactive audio and visual stations, visitors are encouraged to reflect on what it means to live in Chicago today, on land with deep Indigenous roots, and to consider: How does this knowledge shape your sense of home? What does it mean to be a Chicagoan in the present day? Where does your responsibility lie in a place where access to land and housing remains deeply unequal? How might collective action shift the stakes of who is seen to belong here?
These questions also guided curatorial decisions and resonated through the selection of artists whose work reflects responses to housing precarity, such as the collaboration with The Red Line Service. Led by Rhoda Rosen, it features artists who have themselves experienced housing insecurity. Mensah shares, “I thought it was quite important to have artists in Chicago who experience periods of housing insecurity represented in the show. Their work typically explores what it means to be an artist who experiences housing insecurity – and how that informs the ways they produce art.” Another unexpected yet key illustration is the South Side Home Movie Project, which documents everyday life in Chicago’s public housing. Mensah reflects that there were works that evolved “in ways I didn’t expect, or works that I had not intended initially to be in the show, and I attribute that to several of the meetings I attended through Art Design Chicago, where we were invited to sit down with neighboring institutions and strategize ways that we might work right in a cross institutional way. Because this show is exploring displacement – and it’s a show that’s also thinking about how the city has actively intervened in displacing Chicago’s Black community through the razing of housing projects – I thought it would be interesting and important to use these home movies as a way of establishing and reaffirming the reality that Black Chicagoans have always considered these projects, although they might have had their deficiencies. But these projects were also home. They were still places where families could develop their own traditions, and they were often sort of multigenerational spaces. So, the home movie project was a really unpredictable addition.” The project serves as a reminder that these spaces, though often pathologized, were also sites of family, kinship, and community tradition – places where home was made even as it was systematically unmade by state-led demolition.
The interpretive materials throughout the exhibition reflect the same ethos of care. The wall texts stand out for their personal tone, informative yet direct, speaking to visitors in a way that feels both intimate and accountable. This choice is not only a stylistic one but also a philosophical stance: the histories on display here are not abstract or detached; they are lived, contested, and often painful.
Through a carefully curated range of works, Still Here navigates the intersections of individual experience and communal history. Some pieces feel deeply personal, while others engage with broader historical and conceptual themes, as evidenced, for instance, in the pieces created by Monica Rickert-Bolter and Joel Rickert, siblings whose work centers on collective resistance, empowerment, and faith. In these layered and collaborative curatorial decisions, Still Here gestures toward a transcultural futurity, one that acknowledges the deep entanglements between Indigenous and Black struggles for spatial justice.
One such striking example is Joel Rickert’s engagement with the histories of the Nation of Islam and the Black Panthers, which opens a crucial conversation about Black political life and faith in Chicago. As Mensah notes, leaders and constituents of both organizations were deeply invested in claiming space for Black residents and demanding that the city recognize and respond to their civic needs. In particular, the Black Panther Party’s efforts to build community-based alternatives – such as free medical clinics to address the disproportionate impact of sickle cell anemia, and free breakfast programs for school children impacted by racial and economic segregation – signaled a radical vision of homemaking. This was a vision not confined to the heteronormative nuclear family model, but one grounded in mutual care, nourishment, and education. In this way, the Panthers reimagined community as a site of resistance, where health, dignity, and futurity could be reclaimed through collective action. Reflecting on Rickert’s work, Mensah says, “I think, in a sense, the Black Panthers wanted the Black community to consider themselves as a community that would need to help each other outside of the kind of heteronormative family model, that they would have to work together to feed themselves, to clothe themselves, to take care of themselves. So, I think Joel is definitely thinking about how these organizations, which, because of certain governmental interventions, were dramatically weakened, might still offer valuable strategies for a future, transcultural solidarity.”
Rickert’s Indigenous perspective further deepens the exhibition’s transcultural exploration of spatial justice and solidarity. His work does not merely document or honor these histories, but actively engages with their futurity – asking what it might mean to recover the strategies of organizations like the Nation of Islam and the Black Panthers, whose political imaginations were often undermined by government interventions, and apply them toward a new, holistic horizon. It is this kind of speculative, expansive thinking, grounded in ancestral memory and sharpened by political clarity, that Still Here seeks to foreground. As Mensah notes, “I think there’s an Indigenous approach to thinking about land as palimpsestic – that although someone might be displaced from the land, it does not mean their memory and contributions are not still embedded in that land.”
In this light, Still Here becomes more than a retrospective; it is a curatorial and cultural proposition. It invites us to ask how communities can reclaim homemaking as an act of resistance, collective memory and heritage preservation, and how institutions can shift from mere acknowledgment to structural accountability. The exhibition insists that land and home are not abstractions. They are contested, lived, and continually negotiated, and they carry with them the memory and labor of those who have been pushed out but refuse to be forgotten. By centering artists and community collaborators whose work grapples with the realities of housing instability, the exhibition opens a space for collective reflection: How might we understand homemaking not as an individual pursuit but as a communal, political act? What new forms of belonging might be possible when we confront the histories of displacement that underpin our cities?
Still Here doesn’t offer easy answers. Instead, it offers a terrain where the politics of land, memory, and creative survival unfold in conversation, contradiction, and care. In this light, Still Here resonates with a long and painful trajectory. The site where the exhibition is housed – once home to families, now repurposed as a museum – embodies both absence and potential. The exhibition becomes a counter-archive: a site where displacement is remembered, but also where alternative visions of home, solidarity, and resistance are made visible.
It challenges the city to confront its own layered histories: Who was pushed out? Who gets to stay? And what would it mean for Chicago to take structural accountability not only through acknowledgment but through reparative policy, investment, and imagination?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Fariha Koshul
Fariha Koshul, a Chicago-based writer for Terra Foundation for American Art, combines her academic training in ethics, anthropology and sociology with practical experience in digital curation, collections management and archiving. Her time at the University of Chicago involved leading research projects and collections care aimed at incorporating ethical practices in diverse cultural contexts. Fariha’s work is marked by a deep commitment to an understanding of the ethical implications of working with anthropological material, specifically in curatorial and museum spaces, and to the promotion and preservation of cultural, artistic and faith-based narratives and communal and social histories.
