National Public Housing Museum + Dr. ShaDawn Battle (2025)
Images: (Left) A portrait of Liú méi zhì huì at the National Public Housing Museum wearing a green shirt with a white and yellow plant pattern, black shorts, colorful sneakers, and a ponytail. (Middle) A portrait of jellystone robinson frazier at the National Public Housing Museum. wearing a black shirt with a blue undershirt, a black n95 mask and braids wrapped up in a ponytail.(Right) Dr. ShaDawn Battle sits inside the National Public Housing Museum wearing a shirt that says, "Footwork Saved My Life". All three photos by Joshua Clay Johnson.
“I started to realize how important it is to connect Chicago footwork to spaces—spaces that we’ve been dispossessed from. They didn’t just knock down the structures that housed families when they knocked down the projects. They knocked down cultural production, where dance groups practiced, where art was bred and breathed and had a place to exist and thrive, [and] where Black kids had a place to call home when theirs were volatile.”
ARCHIVE:
National Public Housing Museum
The National Public Housing Museum‘s mission is to promote, preserve, and propel the right of all people to a place to call home. Our Public Oral History Archive shares and activates over 170 (and counting) stories from the people who call public housing home, becoming a source of power, knowledge, and strength in the struggles for housing justice. Our interviews are largely conducted and processed by members of public housing communities. In addition to our public online archive, we have additional interviews that are shared in limited capacities in accordance to narrators’ wishes. Our archive is activated through museum exhibitions, events, and our digital offerings such as our podcast, Out of the Archives. As an International Site of Conscience, NPHM believes that history and memory must inform social change. To foster a more just and humane society, we provide safe spaces to remember and preserve even the most traumatic memories and enable visitors to make connections between the past and related contemporary human rights issues. We also believe that everyone must repair and redress the systemic injustices of the past, leading to our commitment to creative strategies that build the social and cultural capital of public housing residents.
READ MORE: Interview with Liú méi zhì huì & jellystone robinson frazier of the National Public Housing Museum
ARTIST:
Dr. ShaDawn Battle
South Side of Chicago native, Dr. ShaDawn Battle is an Assistant Professor of Critical Ethnic and Black Studies at Xavier University (Cincinnati, OH). She considers herself an artivist, often harnessing Black artistic expression in the service of social justice. Dr. Battle earned her PhD in literature from The University of Cincinnati. Her research interests include African American Literature, Postcolonial Studies, Black Feminist Studies, Critical Race Epistemology, and Hip-Hop Studies. In October of 2023, Dr. Battle was named as the Artist as Instigator Resident for the National Public Housing Museum. Dr. Battle’s project, Place, Space, Werkz, used the art form Chicago Footwork to examine Chicago’s history of housing injustice through various examples of housing violence. It was a three-phase project that culminated in a production, where six youth drew from their political education experience to tell the stories of housing violence through their dancing bodies and other forms of Black artistic expression.
READ MORE: Interview with Dr. ShaDawn Battle