Stephen Towns - Visual Artist

Today marks the first day of Black History Month, and history is such an important part of my art practice. A few weeks ago we officially opened The Safer Waters exhibition during Dr. Martin Luther King weekend. Lu Vickers, the co- author of Remembering Paradise Park: Tourism and Segregation at Silver Springs, and I opened our talk with an image of Dr. King at Chicken Bone Beach, New Jersey's segregated Black beach. We chose that image to drive home the message that Paradise Park was not a one off, and that American history is vast and universal and it affected many Americans.

The next day we laid some blankets on the floor and had a good old fashioned story time. I spent the afternoon reading from Faith Ringgold's Tar Beach to families passing through, in the middle of the exhibition! Tar Beach's protagonist, eight year old Cassie uses her imagination to imagine that her rooftop in the middle of New York City is a beach, and dreams up a place where her working class family can soar above the sky scrapers and the George Washington Bridge.

Tar Beach is Cassie's escape just like Paradise Park was where many Black American families escaped in the mid century. Seated in the gallery we were surrounded by artifacts like Victor Hugo Green's The Negro Motorist Green Book, actual brochures and postcards from Paradise Park, and clothing and other ephemera on loan from the Wichita-Sedgwick County Historical Museum and The Kansas African American Museum.

It is my hope that this exhibition feels like a fun walk down memory lane where you just happen to learn of a historic beach. Safer Waters: Picturing Black Recreation at Midcentury
is open now through June 14, 2026.

Images by Olivia D'Laine, Marissa Kucharek, and Jermaine Bell.