Current Exhibition
The Intermission
The Intermission, the latest offering from The Colored Girls’ Museum, is a workshop production that invites our audience to join in the adventure. Here, a 140-year-old house serves as our protagonist. A colored girl's museum, accompanied by a widow and an ordinary colored girl, navigates intersecting and alternate realities, all in a quest to find their way back home or to each other.
Previous Exhibitions
SIT A SPELL: An Invitation & An Invocation, 2023
Sit a Spell is an invitation to celebrate the work of new artists from the African diaspora. It’s also a call to Black women to invoke the wisdom of their ancestors, remember their history, and chart a path to their future. Just taking the time to Sit A Spell at TCGM is an act of resistance.
SIT A SPELL: Philadelphia International Airport Exhibit, 2022
This installation is borrowed from “First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” a traveling exhibition that typifies TCGM’s transformative approach. With the understanding that Black girlhood is often fraught with societal hardships that can interfere with health and well-being, the show features the work of six Black women artists who were paired with African American girls between the ages of 10-18. The resulting portraits evoke both movement and rest, contemplation and action.
Like the museum it emerges from, “Sit a Spell” reminds us that while stillness and motion might seem to be at odds, in truth they sustain each other. Even the most urgent mission requires us to slow down for a moment. Be still. Know that when we arise, it will be with renewed insight and purpose. The Colored Girls Museum dedicates this exhibition to our friend and colleague Victoria Renee Edwards (July 7, 1991 - December 9, 2021). You are always with us.
The One Room SchoolHouse, Spring 2021
The Colored Girls Museum is pleased to premiere The One Room SchoolHouse Exhibitions/Opportunities and Programs for 2021.
TCGM is responding to the unique challenges presented by Covid-19 by expanding our approach to museum making, which also allows us to facilitate vital conversations centering girls and womxn of the African diaspora with a global community.
First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, 2021
Black girlhood is a site of great triumph and sometimes trauma. This portrait project focuses on their intersection in a visual narrative which takes a classic museum artifact “The Portrait” as its primary subject. Black Girls while often looked at are seldom seen --this project creates space to see black girls in their girlhood. To offer the portrait of the ordinary black girl as a monument.
The Portrait Series is intended to be a travelling event, which emphasizes the importance of black girls and black womxn expanding her boundaries and moving about the world while simultaneously highlighting the tension and danger inherent in her movement. First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, 2021 is the first exhibit designed by TCGM to leave the museum, traveling throughout Philadelphia, and then out of the state.
The Colored Girls Museum NOIR, 2021
The Psalms - For A Time Like This:
A Virtual Instagram Exhibition, 2020
TCGM invites curators to help us reflect on our work, how we are being shaped and reshaped in this moment, we share our stories and strategies for survival and celebration through artifacts which are significant. The Colored Girls Museum hacks the system with an Instagram takeover. It is our way of offering the colored girl the protection praise and grace she needs For A Time Like This.
Queens: The Weight of Our Crown
As Queens of African Diaspora, we don’t need the status and wealth of monarchs to know our value. We reign over our responsibilities with beauty, strength, and excellence. From time to time, we may stumble under the weight, but we fight to preserve, excel and master our hardships.
Our crowns have deep history and come with their own set of rules and responsibilities. Queens: The Weight of Our Crown is a capstone project designed to create conversations around the relationship we have with our hair. While all are welcome to experience and listen to the conversation, this prototype aims to create empathy, understanding, and rehabilitation within the African Diasporic communities.
Psalms of Toni Morrison Exhibition, 2019
Psalms of Toni Morrison Exhibition, 2019 celebrates and is inspired by the sacred texts of the inter-dimensional traveler that is Toni Morrison. This exhibition was grounded in her fictional works with artist submissions reflecting Morrison's quotes.
In Search of The Colored Girl, 2018
Our fourth exhibition highlights the crisis of missing black women and girls in this country. In Search of The Colored Girl features an installation curated by artists from The Women’s Mobile Museum. In a docent-led tour of the exhibit, patrons become the “search party.”; the museum is an excavation site and visual travelog.
Urgent Care, A Social Care Experience, 2017
Urgent Care, A Social Care Experience, 2017 features an intergenerational group of artists and ordinaries who explore the concept of Urgent Care moving beyond the "medical” to consider how a variety of issues and circumstances overlap, producing the need for Urgent Care Now. TCGM offers the cultural institution as a revolutionary healthcare facility for the ordinary colored girl.
A Good Night’s Sleep, 2016
A collective of nomadic travelers is charged with curing 400 years of sleeplessness which has plagued her people. A series of curated exhibits, performances, stories, and artifacts that explore the issue of sleep as it impacts colored girls. Artists and curators will examine sleep as a "sacred/healing space" transforming each room in the museum into a sleep chamber --we explore the issues keeping us awake and offer a prescription for a “good night's sleep.”
The Colored Girls Museum: Open for Business, 2015
The Colored Girls Museum: Open for Business debuted at The Philadelphia Fringe Festival on September 11, 2015, disguised as a bed and breakfast. Thirty artists and community members collaborated to transform an ordinary house into a memoir museum with art and artifacts significant to the ordinary Colored Girl. This salon-style exhibition and installation, re-imagined the museum as a sanctuary, underground railroad, and historical record. Throughout the exhibition ordinary colored girls “act “as curators and innkeepers of the Colored Girls Museum.