Market Square
The exhibition continues across the street in Market Square, an architecture, which along with adjacent Market House, was directly implicated in the business of slavery a hundred years before its reprogramming into RISD's campus. Market House and Square were built in the 18th century, at a time when Rhode Island merchants controlled sixty to ninety per cent of the American slave trade. These sites represent the civic architectures of colonial settlements in New England, whose prosperity was dependent on both the trade of black bodies and commodities central to slavery, as well as on the displacement of indigenous peoples from their land. These sites are symbolic of the continued erasures of history, and Black life in Providence. Our intervention on an existing panel that talks about Market House and Square draws attention to this unspoken history of our site.