MUSEUM STUDIES

GTMO & GSO

This project was an experiment in community history, exploring surprising resonances between Greensboro and a community thousands of miles away: the Guantánamo naval base (GTMO) in Cuba.  As part of the national Guantánamo Public Memory Project, students researched and created an exhibition panel about life on the base in the 1950s and ’60s, a time when U.S. service members and their families remember GTMO as a tightknit self-contained community.  The students’ work appeared in an exhibition that traveled to a dozen locations across the country and then to London and Istanbul.  When the exhibition came to Greensboro’s International Civil Rights Center and Museum, students created a series of public programs and added exhibition components that connected its themes to Greensboro residents.