This Gallery Bergen exhibition features Women of the Ramapough Lenape Nation, photographic portraits by Lisa Levart, photographs by Ellen Denuto, videos by Myles Aronowitz and Tim Blunk and Gregg Biermann, as well as the interactive exhibit, Our Land, Our Stories Excavating Subterranean Histories of Ringwood Mines and the Ramapough Lunaape Nation coordinated and edited by Anita Bakshi. This 24-panel pop-up exhibit will be set up on several sites on the Bergen Community College campuses through October and November.
Lisa Levart has been creating alternative photographic portraits of women embodying poetic myths for well over a decade. Her latest exhibition, The Women of the Ramapough Lenape Nation, is a creative collaboration between the artist and women from the Ramapough Lenape Nation exploring long forgotten Lenape myths.
Our Land, Our Stories Excavating Subterranean Histories of Ringwood Mines and the Ramapough Lunaape Nation, Coordinated/edited by Anita Bakshi.
The Ramapough Lunaape Turtle Clan, have called Ringwood, New Jersey home for centuries. The surrounding landscape features iron mines, Native American rock shelters, and a forest that provides food for hunters and foragers. But it also contains a stew of different chemical toxicants from the former Ford manufacturing plant, deep pockets of contaminated soil, streams that now flow with orange water, and the Ringwood Mines/Landfill Superfund Site. The people live in the Superfund site, just upstream from the Wanaque Reservoir, which provides drinking water to millions of New Jersey residents. This pop-up exhibition illustrates the connections between scientific data, environmental remediation reports, and personal narratives of the cultural and spiritual traditions of the Ramapough community. It presents visualizations of traditional Lenape stories and imaginative design proposals for memorials that mark environmental losses.