The Sketch Book of Nick DeLuca

This piece was originally published in The Boston Globe Rhode Island. You can read the entire article here.

The Providence Children’s Museum hosts several engaging exhibits and programs for youths. Its focus is on learning through play with an emphasis on STEM activities. Perhaps due to this focus, the museum has overlooked a glaring historical interpretation problem.

The museum’s second floor is home to the “Coming to Rhode Island” gallery. The gallery offers visitors an overview of some of the people who came to Rhode Island from England, Ireland, Cape Verde, and the Dominican Republic, spanning the early days of European colonization to the 1960s. According to the museum’s website, the gallery “celebrates the cultural diversity of the Ocean State.” While the museum does well by including these stories in the exhibit, it also silences the early history of the Indigenous, African, and enslaved communities that lived around Narragansett Bay.

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