Declaration House

During the drafting of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Thomas Jefferson and enslaved valet Robert Hemmings spent several months at 700 Market Street in Philadelphia. The editors and contributors to Declaration House reflect on the history of this site and illuminate the entangled legacy of freedom and enslavement at the core of our nation’s founding. They expand our history by revisiting and mapping this historic place in the city and nation, past and present, as a way to tend to our democracy today.

At the center of the book is artist Sonya Clark’s revelatory public artwork “The Descendants of Monticello,” a multichannel video installation created in collaboration with Hemmings’ collateral descendants and others who are related to the hundreds of people enslaved at Monticello. Interviews and essays about the project and the site consider history, memory, and the founding of our country. Like Clark’s project, Declaration House asks the timely question, "What does the Declaration of Independence mean to us today?"

Contributors: Niya Bates, Kerry Bickford, Paul Buchanan, Sonya Clark, Andrew M. Davenport, Kai Davis, Husnaa Haajarah Hashim, J. Calvin Jefferson Sr., Jabari Jefferson, Jane Kamensky, Matthew Kenyatta, Salamishah Tillet, Gayle Jessup White, Auriana Woods, and the editors

Anna Arabindan-Kesson is Associate Professor of Black Diasporic Art at Princeton University. She is the author of Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton and Commerce in the Atlantic World, which won the 2023 Historians of British Art Award for a single-authored book with a subject between 1800 and 1960.

Paul M. Farber is Director and Co-Founder of Monument Lab. Farber is the author or coeditor of several books including Monument Lab: Re:Generation (Temple) and A Wall of Our Own: An American History of the Berlin Wall.

Yolanda Wisher is the Senior Curator at Monument Lab. She is the author of the poetry collection Monk Eats an Afro and was named inaugural Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania in 1999 and Poet Laureate of Philadelphia in 2016. A Pew and Cave Canem Fellow, Wisher received the Leeway Foundation's Transformation Award in 2019 for her commitment to art for social change. In 2022, she was named a Philadelphia Cultural Treasures Artist Fellow.