Huntington African American Museum plans programs, exhibits as they await new building

While a $50 million brick-and-mortar Huntington African American Museum is years away, museum officials are focusing on fundraising and creating programs to give the museum name recognition.

    In July, officials announced the museum received a $300,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation’s Humanities in Place grant program. The money will go toward supporting the museum’s organizational capacity, broaden community programming and allow the museum to sponsor events for the town’s Juneteenth celebration, said Barry D. Lites, the museum’s board chair. 

Also in July, the museum board announced Tiarra Inez Brown had been hired as curator for an exhibit on one of the town’s early African American leaders, Peter Crippen. During the fall and spring, the museum partnered with churches and nonprofits on initiatives such as getting out the vote and panel discussions, including what it takes to be an entrepreneur.

"We’re busy," Lites said. "Our focus in this time, where we do not have a building, is to elevate our profile, keep ourselves in the community’s consciousness."

The museum was established in 2022 to be a vehicle to tell the stories of African Americans who lived, worked and thrived in the town since its founding in 1653.

In 2023, the town board approved a 99-year license agreement with the museum to allow a 1½-acre plot of town-owned land to be used for the facility. The location, at the corner of New York Avenue and Mill Dam Road in Halesite, is close to what used to be an area where African Americans settled, including Peter Crippen.

Town officials are expected to dismantle the Peter Crippen house this month because it’s structurally unsound. Parts of the house and any artifacts related to it are being given to the museum to preserve and exhibit, Lites said.

The house was built as a grist mill on Creek Road around 1650 and was later converted for use as a family home and sold as such to Crippen in 1864, according to town documents. Historians consider the house to be one of the oldest industrial buildings in North America, according to museum officials.

Brown, 29, said in addition to the Crippen project, she envisions projects on churches, brick builders and other notable Huntington residents and people who visited such as Jupiter Hammon, the first published Black poet in North America and singer-actor Paul Robeson.

She was a curatorial associate for exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, including: The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism; Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph; Lee Bul, Long Tail Halo; and Tong Yang-Tze, Dialogue. She is currently a curator for Paradise/Mash-Up at the Boston Center for the Arts.

Newsday recently interviewed Brown about her work and the importance of educating people about African American history. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

It will be a long time before there is a museum building. What will you be working on in the meantime?

The plan is to build a smaller interim exhibition, a traveling exhibition to be brought into schools and possibly pop-up exhibitions at cultural sites around town. So, I’ll be researching and building those out. I’ll also be collaborating with the Huntington Historical Society and Heckscher Museum to build out awareness of the museum and of the Crippen house project.

What interested you in working with the Huntington African American Museum?

Huntington has a rich African American history as documented by the town's African American Historic Designation Council. But there is an incredible amount of African American stories that have not been told yet or told in the depth that a museum can do. So I’m excited to highlight some of these stories and reintegrate them into the very rich history that Huntington has. Crippen house has had such a tenuous history of, 'will it move' or 'will it be historically designated, will it be turned into a parking lot.' So my role is to preserve it and its legacy and stories and to be a part of that is amazing. 

Why is it important to separate African American history from American history?

For far too long, we’ve seen the two separated. American history typically has not included African American history, so I think this museum focusing solely on African American history is about equity. To fill in the spaces that American history typically leaves out when discussing history in totality. It’s about putting African American history back into American history so we can talk about it holistically.

What is your intention for your work at the museum?

I hope to create a space for Black and brown dysphoric children to feel seen and celebrated and heard ...   A dream ideal for me would be to create a space that someone can come in and still feel heard and seen even if they are not a Huntington resident.