Following an intensive, year-long community engagement process, the Prospect Park Alliance on Wednesday said the Lefferts Historic House in Prospect Park now has an interpretive plan for the museum that will explore the lives, resistance and resilience of the Africans enslaved by the Lefferts family and the indigenous people of Lenapehoking who lived in the area before the house was built.
Thousands of hours of conversation, insight, feedback and guidance from descendant communities, culture bearers, scholars, artists, civic leaders and museum professionals was part of creating the future of exhibits and programming, according to a news release.
The plan is centered on a series of outdoor exhibits. Upon entrance to the grounds, there will be large-scale panels curated by representatives from nations across the Lenape diaspora and a Dikenga Cosmogram that honors the ancient wisdom Africans brought with them to the Americas.
The plan also features public art, healing gardens, a Freedom-Seeker wall, and spaces for live events and programs that do not shy away from the history of dispossession and enslavement, but emphasize and celebrate the inspirational resilience of descendant communities today and the ways their cultures endure, according to the news release.
Elements of the interpretive plan will be developed over the next year, and Prospect Park Alliance’s work to solicit guidance from descendant communities to inform the future of the Lefferts Historic House will continue through events and other engagements.
As a first step in the new interpretation, the Alliance, which helps run and manage Prospect Park with the City, welcomed its artist-in-residence, Adama Delphine Fawundu and her exhibit Ancestral Whispers.
The interpretative plan is part of ReImagine Lefferts, the initiative launched in 2021 by the museum to shift its focus from highlighting the life of the Leffertses – a family of Dutch settlers, once one of the wealthiest families in Brooklyn, as well as one the largest slaveholding families in the county, to celebrating the stories of the Africans enslaved by the Lefferts and the Lenape people.
In doing so, Lefferts Historic House is coming to terms with its colonial past while providing a safe and accessible space for engaging audiences with a problematic collective history, as well as addressing contemporary issues affecting descendant communities today, the news release said.
