Art exhibit curated by Bloomfield students to be displayed at Newark Public Library

An art exhibit curated by Bloomfield College students will be featured at one of Essex County’s most historic locations this fall, as “Newark ’74: Remember the Puerto Rican Riots – An Unexamined History” made its formal debut at the Newark Public Library in a special evening event Oct. 1.

Made possible by grant funding from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, the display will help educate the surrounding community on an overlooked piece of the city’s rich history on its 40th anniversary. Curated by Bloomfield College students, the exhibit will showcase never-before-exhibited press photos of the riots from local publications such as the Newark Star-Ledger.

Archivist Yesenia Lopez and associate archivist Elizabeth Parker of the Puerto Rican Community Archives (PRCA) and the Newark Public Library have selected supplementary materials from the PRCA’s collections for the new exhibit, adding them in order to contextualize the riots.

"Most people have heard about the massive uprising that took place in Newark in 1967, but very few have heard about the riots that took place in Newark's Puerto Rican community just seven years later,” Bloomfield Assistant Professor of History and Exhibit Director Michelle Chase said of the work. “We are so excited that the Newark Public Library has agreed to showcase this exhibit; it is something our students should be extremely proud of."

Materials will be on display in the Fourth Floor Gallery of the Newark Public Library through December 2014. For more information on the exhibit, click here.

About the exhibit

This exhibition was made possibly by a grant from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, a state partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations in this exhibit do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or the new Jersey Council for the Humanities.