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UNEARTHING HIDDEN HISTORIES: Stephen Towns and Dr. Edda Fields-Black in Conversation
UNEARTHING HIDDEN HISTORIES: Stephen Towns and Dr. Edda Fields-Black in Conversation
Wednesday, May 14th, 2025 at 5:30pm
FREE! And Open to the Public
Join ALL STARS artist Stephen Towns and Dr. Edda Fields-Black, Director of the Dietrich College Humanities Center at Carnegie Mellon University, discuss the ways in which the artist reframes essential concepts such as freedom, love, citizenship, and dignity in America.
Working as a painter and fiber artist, Towns frequently engages archival materials— including photographs, publications, and oral histories—to create majestic and powerful portraits that celebrate African American experiences overlooked from the canonical narratives of American history.
PHOTO CAPTION: StephenTowns, We Shall Pass through the Combahee. 2019. Natural and synthetic fabric, nylon tulle, polyester and cotton thread, metallic thread, crystal glass beads, buttons. Courtesy of the artist.
Stephen Towns
Stephen Towns (b. 1980, Lincolnville, South Carolina) lives and works in Baltimore, MD. Towns trained as a painter with a BFA in studio art from the University of South Carolina and has also developed a rigorous, self-taught quilting practice.
In 2018, the Baltimore Museum of Art presented his first solo museum exhibition, Stephen Towns: Rumination and a Reckoning. The exhibition went on to travel to artist Mark Bradford’s gallery Art & Practice in Los Angeles. His second solo museum exhibition, Declaration and Resistance, toured three US museums from 2022-23.
In 2025, Towns was the first artist to participate in the relaunch of Gilcrease Museum’s artist-in-residence program. In 2024, Towns won a Baker Award from The William G. Baker Jr. Memorial Fund and the Mary Sawyers Imboden Prize, the top prize from the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance.
His work has been featured in publications such as the New York Times, Colossal, Artforum, the Washington Post, Hyperallergic, Cultured, Forbes, AFROPUNK, and American Craft.
Towns’ work is in a number of private and public collections,including Art + Practice (Los Angeles, CA), the Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore, MD), the Boise Museum of Art, (Boise, ID), the City of Charleston (Charleston, SC), the National Museum of African American History and Culture (Washington DC); the National Portrait Gallery (Washington DC); Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City, MO), the Rockwell Museum (Corning, NY); The Westmoreland Museum of American Art (Greensburg, PA); the Wichita Museum of Art (Wichita, KS).
Dr. Edda Fields-Black
Dr. Edda Fields-Black is a Professor in the Department of History and the Director of the Dietrich College Humanities Center at Carnegie Mellon University. She has worked as a consultant at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the International African American Museum, and the Senator John Heinz History Center.
Her research specialty is the trans-national history of West African rice farmers, peasant farmers in pre-colonial Upper Guinea Coast and enslaved laborers on rice plantations in the antebellum South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry. Throughout her career, Fields-Black has used interdisciplinary sources and methods to uncover the voices of historical actors in pre-colonial West Africa and the African Diaspora who did not author written sources.
Fields-Black’s new book, COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War (Oxford University Press) offers the fullest account to date of Tubman’s Civil War service. This narrative history tells the untold story of the Combahee River Raid from the perspective of Tubman and the enslaved people she helped to free based on new sources not previously used by historians, as well as new interpretations of sources familiar to Tubman’s biographers. It is the story of Harriet Tubman’s Civil War service during which she worked as a cook and nurse in Beaufort, SC, and gathered intelligence among freed people and enslaved Blacks. It is the story of enslaved people who labored against their wills on seven rice plantations, ran for their lives, boarded the US gunboats, and sailed to freedom.