2025 Exhibit Gallery

The 2025 National theme, “African Americans and Labor” focused on the various and profound ways that work and working of all kinds – free and unfree, skilled, and unskilled, vocational and voluntary – intersect with the collective experiences of African Americans. Studying African Americans’ labor and labor struggles allows for new interpretations and reinterpretations of African American heritage and its continuing evolution. (asalh.org)
 

WORK-- The notion of work constitutes compensated labor in factories, the military, government agencies, office buildings, public service, and private homes. It also includes the community building of social justice activists, voluntary workers serving others, and institution building in churches, community groups, and social clubs and organizations. Understanding Black labor and its impact in all these multivariate settings is integral to understanding Black people, their histories, lives, and cultures.

Curated and presented by Junctions, the Lakeshore Mall 2025 Black History Month Commemoration, “Cornerstones and Pillars” was a visual and oral exhibit, highlighting National, and some of Highlands County’s past and present African American entrepreneurs, labor contributors, and supporters. Exhibit features included four Guest Speakers, Entrepreneur and Labor Photographic Profiles, Literature and Artisan Displays, Interactive Oral History Video and more. The exhibit was intentional in encouraging broad reflections on intersections between African American’s work and their workplaces in all their iterations and key moments.

Results: The exhibit ran from February 8 - 28, 2025, with over 700 visitors touring the exhibit.