I'm so excited to celebrate the opening of "In Slavery's Wake: Making Black Freedom in the World."

Isn't this an amazing night?

10 years in the making.

Since it opened in 2016, The Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, NMAAHC for short, has been dedicated to inspiring a full accounting of African Americans in our nation's story.

A new exhibit called "In Slavery's Wake" expands on that mission.

This history is ours, and we must reckon with it.

A lot of people think about slavery as something that is relegated to our past.

♪ "In Slavery's Wake" helps us understand that this past really continues to shape our present.

Singers: ♪ Wade in the water, children... ♪ We really lean on this metaphor of the wake.

We're thinking about the wake of a ship going through water and the waves that sort of form in its trail.

♪ We're still feeling the reverberations of things that have happened in the past.

Curry, voice-over: The museum's congressional mandate is to tell the story of African Americans in the United States.

The exhibition "In Slavery's Wake" tells a global story.

Obenda, voice-over: We have collaborating curators from across 4 continents and nearing to 200 objects and artifacts.

Gardullo, voice-over: This spirit of collaboration has really broadened our horizons, not just about what this museum can do, but what museums should be doing.

Curry, voice-over: This exhibition innovates how history is told in museums.

Gardullo, voice-over: Many exhibitions lean into the systems of violence and tend to leave out the stories of freedom-making and the perspective of those who were enslaved.

Obenda, voice-over: The story of Tahro was actually proposed to us by one of our collaborators in Belgium.

Tahro was trafficked from what at that time was the Kingdom of Kongo aboard a slave ship called the "Wanderer."

A big group of survivors arrive in Edgefield, South Carolina, and they're forced to work as enslaved potters.

Tahro was one of those potters.

Scholars today believe those survivors also made personal pottery for themselves.

They make a lot of connections between these face vessels and different Central African ritual objects called minkisi.

We're able to bring that cup together with a minkisi from our partners in Brussels, and we're able to tell the story of illegal slave trading that might not be familiar for a lot of our visitors, but we're also able to think about how enslaved people like Tahro are forced to make new lives for themselves on the other side of the Atlantic world.

Gardullo, voice-over: In the course of our research, we came upon this thread of people who were enslaved mounting rebellions and revolutions and rallying under banners of freedom.

But there's just traces of this history.

Instead of saying we don't know, we embrace the idea of, What can we know?

And this is what led us into conversations with artists.

Obenda, voice-over: Artist Nyugen E. Smith has created flags in honor of historic anti-slavery movements and anti-colonial movements.

They're his interpretation of what's recorded in the history and really sort of an homage.

Smith, voice-over: It struck a chord with me that banners or flags were actually created by those who were fighting for their literal lives.

Haiti has the tradition of creating voodoo flags that incorporate sequins as a way to create the illustrations on the actual flags themselves.

And so this is a nod back to Haiti being the first successful Black revolt.

We have the Tailors' Revolt.

The flag has the white stitching as a border, and then some of those stitches just kind of hanging was one of those ways I'm thinking about people who were part of the rebellion themselves.

Curry, voice-over: An 1800 Richmond-area revolt called Gabriel's Rebellion was planned by an enslaved blacksmith.

Smith: My uncle is a blacksmith, Anthony Phillips, and immediately I knew that I wanted to collaborate with him to create these flags as a way to, one--connect this blacksmithing tradition and to connect my family and lineage and legacy within this project.

Gardullo, voice-over: Through the incorporation of art directly into the exhibition, we are pushing the envelope of what history exhibitions can do.

Curry, voice-over: In this exhibition, the word freedom does not mean the abolition of slavery.

Gardullo, voice-over: We look at freedom as a process of making freedom, and we thought that this concept was so important that we cede a large portion of the space to have an artist help visitors not just think about that idea but feel it, to inhabit it.

Man, voice-over: I began it with a simple idea of the people who were brought over here in slave ships and how they manifest their desire to build a world for themselves.

The whole background is collaged, torn, ripped in pieces, and quilted back together to form pattern and texture.

You walk in and you hear the sound of water.

[Water flowing] Woman: ♪ Mm... ♪ Minter, voice-over: Then you hear the sound of my mother singing.

Woman: ♪ Mm... ♪ Minter, voice-over: The image of hands weaving became a really strong metaphor for freedom-making.

Woman: ♪ Mm... ♪ Minter, voice-over: Are only historians allowed to say what happened?

No.

Everyone can do that.

Obenda, voice-over: Daniel Minter captured a space that's meant to be serene, to really provoke and invite reflection.

I think that's a way that I would like to learn this history.

Minter, voice-over: I hope that people can feel the connection to that history and that they can see a future that this history is building on.

Obenda, voice-over: To infuse art into a history exhibition has been really exciting for me.

It's something I'd love to carry forward in future projects.

Gardullo, voice-over: Museums should be transformational spaces.

That's what people are sort of hungry for, is this deeper sense of what these institutions mean and can do, not just as dictating thought or ideas.

Woman: ♪ By the waters of Babylon... ♪ Gardullo, voice-over: This exhibition is a bridge between peoples, periods of time, and between ourselves and our responsibilities to making the world better.

We can't change the past.

It is only when we confront it that we can forge a basis for unity amongst ourselves.

[Cheering and applause] Curry, voice-over: "In Slavery's Wake" runs through June 8th.

Check nmaahc.si.edu for details.