Our Story

Founded in 2015, the Colored Girls Museum is housed in a 140-year-old three-story Victorian Twin home in the historic Germantown area of Philadelphia. We are the first cultural institution to center and champion the “ordinary” colored girl of African descent, citizens whose ingenuity and labor generate untold wealth yet whose stories are often hidden from view. The Colored Girls Museum has an irreplaceable quality that is both symbolic and grounded in reality.

Our programs and special projects During its years of serving the Philadelphia community and beyond, TCGM has become an anchor institution, turning the concept of radical placekeeping on its head by redefining what a museum can do. It has also been a source of inspiration and support for numerous Black and Black femme-led projects and initiatives.

TCGM distinguishes itself by exclusively collecting, preserving, honoring, and decoding artifacts pertaining to the experience and herstory of Colored Girls. This museum is equal parts research facility, exhibition space, gathering place, and think tank. TCGM was founded in 2015 and is located in the historic neighborhood of Germantown in Philadelphia, an area renowned for its complement of historic buildings and homes.

This start-up museum enterprise has been written about in the Smithsonian Magazine, Essence, Associated Press, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Travel Noire, Metro U.K., and others.

The Colored Girls Museum is a sanctuary, not for Colored Girls only, but for anyone who is ready for a conscious revolution.

Our Mission

is to provide sanctuary for the collective memory of ordinary Black girls, women, and gender-expansive peoples. We believe that our existence and resistance furthers our freedom. We believe that through archiving, memorializing, and documenting our embodied wisdom that we enliven and inoculate patrons against deficit normative definitions and oppressive constrictions they are sure to come face to face with outside of our doors.

Our Vision

TCGM presents as a museum to be an unassuming learning site gifting restoration, often unconsciously needed by each of our patrons. This subversive operation allows us to archive a unique counter-narrative of Black Girlhood and femmehood through our exhibits, events, research, community partnerships, and programs. The Colored Girls Museum seeks to provide a home to Colored Girls everywhere by providing a safe harbor in a HOME.

Our Purpose

We are a public ritual for the protection, praise & grace of the ordinary colored girl.
We seek to protect them from all that might cause harm.
We offer grace by housing stories, memories, hopes, fears, and dreams.
We speak praise over them for all that they are.

Our Board
of Advisors

University of Toledo
Dean and Director of The Ohio State University at Lima
Project Director, Boston Busing Desegregation Project at Union of Minority Neighborhoods.
Faculty, Systemic Racism, Harvard Divinity School
Major Gift Officer, The Salvation Army New Jersey Divisional Headquarters
Nursing Home Liaison Jacobi Medical Center and North Bronx Hospital
Sexual Assault Response Team (SART) North Central Bronx Hospital
Board Member
† November 30, 1941 - March 2, 2020
Novelist/Writer, Author of Blanche White mystery novels

Our Staff

Co-Founder, Performance Curator and Associate Director
Ian Friday is an audio/visual curator who explores and exhibits cultural traditions and histories of people from the African diaspora. Founder of Global Soul Music, Ian produces music that archive and uncover ongoing black musical cultures connecting house, soul, afro beat, jazz and world music. As Associate Director of The Colored Girls Museum Ian assists in developing programming and creates marketing for the museum's social media platforms. The histories of people from African descent have been passed down through the ages primarily through oral tradition. Music and art serve as conduits to deepening our understanding of those narratives.

Founder and Executive Director
Vashti Dubois is a social practice artist, creative scholar, and institution-builder who earned her BA at Wesleyan University. She has a background in theater and nonprofit program development, with an emphasis on womxn and girls. In 2015 she founded the Colored Girls Museum (TCGM) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a grassroots “place-based” living museum that honors and memorializes the experiences of women and girls of the African diaspora. Today TCGM is home base for an ever-widening circle of artists and scholars who create projects that center community. Dubois’ forthcoming book, Housework: A Memoir, will be released in 2023.

Co-Founder and Curator
Michael Clemmons is a Visual Artist, Curator of The Colored Girls Museum (TCGM), and Director of Temple University’s Center for Community Partnerships (TU-CCP). As Curator Mr. Clemmons is a part of TCGM’s leadership team and has steered the curation and implementation of eleven exhibitions since the museum’s opening in 2015. As Director of TU-CCP, a center which houses projects formerly associated with the Center for Social Policy and Community Development (CSPCD) he leads a scope of work with 50 years of tradition in workforce Development, Adult Education and Community engagement. With over 30 years of experience Mr. Clemmons directs initiatives from inception to implementation and coordinates strategic partnerships to facilitate programming, while advancing the goals and mission of TUCCP, Temple University and the Office of Community Relations.

Tour Coordinator

Managing Director

Our Scholar-in-Residence & Incubator

Incubator
Destiny Crockett (she/her) is a scholar-artist who is curious about African American girlhood in the 20th and 21st centuries, Black feminisms, 20th and 21st-century African American women’s literature and visual culture, Black archive theories, and Black queer studies.
Some of her published works include “Danitra Vance’s Cabrini Green Jackson and the Performance of Black Girlishness,” Visual Arts Research (Summer 2021) and “Black Girlhood in Toni Cade Bambara’s Literary Archive and Black Feminist Archival Approaches” Resources for American Literary Study (Winter 2021). Her visual artworks ask many of the same questions as her scholarly work, using collage and mixed media to analyze themes of age, the sartorial, beauty, play, and sexuality.
Her art practice is supported in part by The Colored Girls Museum, where she works through an artist incubator program, and where her works are part of the permanent collection. Destiny earned her PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania with certificates in Africana Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and her B.A. in English with certificates in African American Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies from Princeton University.

Scholar-in-Residence
Loren S. Cahill is a scholar creative, organizer, cultural worker, popular educator, and womanist bibliophile from St. Louis. Her professional training is in Participatory Action Research (Tuck, 2009), Liberation Psychology (Braynt-Davis & Moore-Lobban, 2020), and Black Feminism (Taylor, 2017).
Loren is an Assistant Professor at Smith College School for Social Work where she teaches courses on Community Organizing, Movement Building, Antiracism, and Critical Research Methods. Her research explores how self-expression and self-determination lead to healing and wellness in the individual and collective lives of Black people. The interventions living inside of Black activism, organizing, and art, provide the axis around which all of her scholarly pursuits rotate. Loren was also appointed the inaugural Scholar-In-Residence at The Colored Girls Museum in 2021.
Loren is positively obsessed (Butler, 2011) with the ways that bodies, books, and built environments can offer freedom. Cahill received her Ph.D. in critical social personality environmental psychology from the City University of New York, an M.S.W. from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and a B.A. in Africana and educational studies from Wellesley College.