You may want to forget 2020. Miami’s history museum is making sure you don’t
Most people may want to forget everything about 2020, but it’s the HistoryMiami Museum’s job to make sure that we don’t.
And so the institution is launching a vox populi campaign to ensure that Miamians’ particular experience of the defining events of this fateful and traumatic year — the COVID-19 pandemic, widespread demonstrations for racial justice and consequential local and national elections — is amply documented and preserved for posterity.
HistoryMiami is soliciting the public’s help. It’s asking locals to contribute written or verbal accounts, photographs and artifacts or other memorabilia that tell the story of 2020 in their hometown.
The museum’s Collecting 2020 project is off to a good start. Several signal items are already in its hands, including Miami Heat star Bam Adebayo’s Black Lives Matter game jersey, a series of election campaign posters and one of the first vials of coronavirus vaccine used at Jackson Memorial Hospital as inoculations began.
Also in the collection: the Grim Reaper costume worn by lawyer Daniel Uhlfelder as he toured Florida’s beaches to warn the heedless about the deadly spread of the novel coronavirus.
The terrifying costume and its plastic but convincing-looking scythe, Uhlfelder said during the project’s official launch on Wednesday, will be a reminder both of what he described as state government failures in combating and containing the pandemic in Florida, but also of the critical need for officials and institutions to provide accurate information even when the news is bad.
“We should not have to take such drastic measures to draw attention to this deadly pandemic,” Uhlfelder said. “We should be able to speak truthfully about dangers we encounter and take them head on. We should not downplay them or sugarcoat them because we fear we cannot handle them. This is what has happened in this pandemic.”
The 80-year-old museum, Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava noted Wednesday, has long sought to portray the city’s history, including “sometimes the very scary moments of our history,” in an engaging way.
By focusing on Miamians’ everyday experiences as a window into 2020, she said the resulting exhibit will highlight not just the year’s troubles, but how Miami strove to overcome them.
“This year will be remembered for the ingenuity, resilience, compassion and creativity of all those who worked and sacrificed to protect our community from COVID-19,” Levine Cava said at the Cultural Center plaza downtown.
“This year will be remembered for the renewed fight for racial equality across the country. It will be remembered for recordbreaking participation in our democracy. And it will be remembered for the ways as a community we stood and worked together in new ways to get through an unprecedented crisis.”
The material collected will likely form the basis for an exhibit, although no date has been set, the museum said.