Lunch with the Libraries & Museums - Unveiling the Imprint of Black Women Hidden in Plain Sight

Nicoletta Darita de la Brown is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist and curandero chamána (shamanic practitioner). Her artworks re-conceive the life of an artist as thriving, nourishing others during and through her art practice, while healing herself in public space as a Black-Latin woman. She is a MacDowell Fellow, Artist-In-Residence at Baltimore School for the Arts, 2022-24 Tabb Center Public Humanities Fellow at Johns Hopkins University, 2024 KODA Mental Health Resident Artist, 2024 Vermont Studio Center Marshall Frankel Fellowship Artist in Residence. Former sculpture professor at Towson University and former adjunct faculty in the MFA in Community Arts Graduate Program at Maryland Institute College of Art. 

Nicoletta’s performances have been presented at The National Aquarium, Baltimore MD; The Phillips Collection, Washington DC; The Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC; The Smithsonian Arts + Industries Building, Washington DC; Walters Art Museum, Baltimore MD; Eubie Blake, Baltimore, MD. Exhibitions of Nicoletta’s video artworks and installations have been presented at Bennington College Usdan Gallery, Bennington, Vermont; The National Aquarium, Baltimore, MD; The Tribeca Film Festival, New York, NY; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore MD; IA&A at Hillyer Gallery, Washington DC; Cardinal Gallery, Baltimore MD; Pinkard Gallery, Baltimore MD; The Segal Gallery, Baltimore MD; Leidy Atrium, Baltimore MD; MICA PLACE, Baltimore MD. Her work is included in private and public collections, such as The Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University, GLB Memorial Foundation Collection, The National Aquarium.  

Tonika Berkley is the Africana Archivist for Special Collections at JHU Sheridan Libraries and is co-director of the Inheritance Baltimore’s Community Archives Program. She has her MAA in Applied Anthropology/Heritage from University of Maryland-College Park and her BA in Sociology/Anthropology from the University of Maryland-Baltimore County. 

Ms. Berkley is a historical researcher, museum educator, humanities facilitator and curator, and has worked for various museums and institutions in Baltimore, Washington, DC, and Philadelphia, including the Walters Art Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Industry, The Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture, and Scribe Video Center. In 2018-19, she served as Research Coordinator and Curator of prototype physical and digital exhibitions for “Education Will Be Our Pride: The Colored School at the Peale (1878-89)”, and curator of a 3D scanned tour of the Peale building, based on the history of Male and Female Colored School No. 1. Ms. Berkley also coordinated the development of a microsite, “School1,” an online repository for the history of 19th century education of African Americans in Baltimore City and surrounding counties. As the Africana Archivist, she has co-curated two exhibitions for Sheridan Libraries, “Community Archives: Preserving Black Baltimore” and “Black Foodways: A Culinary Diaspora” Exhibitions - Sheridan Libraries (jhu.edu).

Dr. Joseph Plaster is Curator in Public Humanities and Director of the Winston Tabb Special Collections Research Center for the Sheridan Libraries & University Museums. In this capacity, he cultivates an exchange of knowledge between the university and greater Baltimore region through participatory action research, oral history initiatives, performances, and courses taught through the Program in Museums and Society and the Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. His research and teaching combine archival, oral history, and public humanities methods to examine the world-making practices of marginalized publics in the United States, with a focus on intersections of gender, sexuality, and race.

Plaster is the author of Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco’s Tenderloin (Feb. 2023, Duke University Press). Kids on the Street combines archival, ethnographic, and oral history research to explore the informal support networks that enabled abandoned and runaway queer youth to survive in tenderloin districts across the United States, and in San Francisco’s Tenderloin in particular. By highlighting a politics where the marginal position of street kids is the basis for a moral economy of reciprocity, he excavates a history of queer life that has been overshadowed by major narratives of gay progress and pride.