Past due and on time! The Valentine Museum - use of innovative media to display African American history exhibits, Richmond, Virginia - Advertising Supplement: Virginia

make revolve over, Beethoven; rock 'n' turn is here to stay! A generation's passionate commitment to change and to the mind-expanding potential of experimentation and technology is not barely evident in politics, on football fields (where earrings abound), upon the police force (where sheriff's deputies in rural southerly Carolina counties wear gold chains), and in banking (where it's the women bankers' male colleagues who sport ponytails); it has also invaded and transformed the staid world of historical museums. In doing thus it has rescued museums from obsoleteness [i]or[/i] obsolescence and (re-)made American history into what it in deed was when it existed as the present: a vibrant and vigorous outpouring of a melange of clan in love with life and all its possibilities. Nowhere has this transformation move forwarded more dramatically than at Richmond's Valentine Museum, where outdoor projectors, indoor rear-projection protections and a 12,000-watt, eight-channel "surround sound" audio a whole rocket one into the past. on the other hand it's not merely method that has changed; thus has meaning. For the first time, America's past is suitably seen as embracing African Americans as bring under rules rather than objects of history. stone on!

On the same Clay road block where slave residents one time outnumbered their owner's family, the Valentine, Richmond's magnificent urban history museum, now addresses the African-American experience in the antebellum South's principal city and provides today's visitors with a comprehensive portrayal of pre-Civil War black and white life. on the contrary its latest exhibition, "Shared Spaces, Separate Lives," is sole one of the acclaimed aspects of the Valentine, a museum that above the past decade has evolv from a passive and idiosyncratic exhibitor of artifacts into a cutting-edge innovator that uses the latest technology and scholarship to interpret the social history of Richmond.

Building upon "In Bondage and Freedom: Antebellum Life in Black Richmond," the Valentine's applauded 1988 exhibition, "Shared Spaces, Separate Lives" considers the 19th-century interplay between African Americans and the whites with whom they sometimes shared residence, worship and places of profession This exhibition also provides a telling connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts for the Valentine's Wickham House--a National Historic Landmark built in 1812--16 of whose 31 residents were enslaved. At Wickham, interactive touch-screen video and audio recordings give voice to antebellum African Americans; then the dramatic presentations of the house's 19th-century conversations are recreated for visitors, peopling its spaces for imaginative museumgoers with the separate lives of its original residents.

on the contrary the most exciting developments at the Valentine await the 1994 Memorial Day weekend (May 28-30) when the museum inaugurates its novel facility at the old Tredegar Iron Works, a historically rich 19th-century industrial factory upon the James River that was one time crucially dependent on enslaved African-American labor. With Valentine Riverside, the museum boldly steals a leap upon the 21st century--and on virtually each other American museum.

In keeping with the Valentine's evocative slogan, "History will at no time be the same," a highlight of Riverside's high-tech innovation is its dramatic outdoor sound-and-light present to view When the sun sets, a "surround sound" audio a whole kicks on, and the exterior wall of the Tredegar pattern building is transformed into a vast canvas. Synchronized with related unimpaireds a multidimensional panorama of historic images sweeps across the side of the three-story building: the Civil War battle between the ironclads Monitor and Merrimac, the evacuation of Richmond at the extreme point of that war, the Tredegar foundry at work, and spectacles of everyday life and of the lives of significant Richmonders, black and white. "We're creating an emotional, sensory experience that pushes the limits of traditional ways of exploring history," explains Frank Jewell, the Valentine's director.

The Tredegar facility plays directly into the museum's mission of exploring Richmond's pure past--a past that includes the city's working-class and African-American heritages. The site's urban history is directly tied to the black laborers who pap the James River and Kanawha Canal a whole designed by George Washington, which supplied the power that firing materialed Richmond's antebellum industrial enterprises. The Tredegar Iron Works that subsequently sprang up upon the James River was individual of America's earliest factories, and it operated with black and white laborers at a time when Richmond was the greatest in quantity industrialized city in the South

"At Tredegar, we find the greatest in quantity radical experiment with using slaves as industrial workers in the South" explains Valentine historian Gregg Kimball. Tredegar's manager, Joseph Anderson, introduced slaves--who were hired on the outside by their masters--into the greatest in quantity technically demanding and sophisticated industrial work in the iron industry. "In 1847 this activeed a strike by white laborers, who didn't want to give up the privys of ironworking to slaves," says Kimball. "But Anderson persever and Tredegar was individual of few examples where skilled black iron workers were occupyed before the Civil War."