It might seem like a stretch to count the Ballantine House as a notable part of Newark’s Black history.
Built in 1885 by John Ballantine, the Scottish-American president of the once sprawling Newark brewery, the brick Renaissance-style mansion was among the large homes of Newark’s oldest and wealthiest families on an ultra-exclusive downtown block opposite what was once known as Washington Park.
But like the park, renamed Harriet Tubman Square in 2022 after the revered Black abolitionist, the Ballantine House now also more closely reflects Newark’s present-day population.
Eighty-six years after the adjacent Newark Museum of Art acquired the Washington Street mansion from a company using it as office space, the Ballantine House reopened to the public in November 2023 following a two-year, $12 million rehabilitation and racially inclusive reinterpretation.
And for the museum’s Black History Month celebration, curators are promoting a temporary exhibit housed in the mansion created by Newark-based artist and historian Noelle Lorraine Williams.
Titled “Stay: The Black Women of 19th-Century Newark,” the exhibit focuses on three accomplished individuals, Ellen King, Sara O’Fake Evans, and Hannah Mandeville, who lived within blocks of the Ballantine House and were key figures in Newark’s Black history.
Black or African American residents make up 47% of Newark’s population, and the 2023 reinterpretation was intended to make the Ballantine House more relevant to people of color, said Amy Simon Hopwood, the museum’s associate curator for decorative arts.
The project added contemporary and vintage paintings, photographs, and histories of Black people from Newark and elsewhere, mounted on walls and other spaces amid the mansion’s more conventional 19th-century furnishings and artwork. The new imagery also includes other racial and ethnic groups as well as working-class people, be they Irish steel smelters, Italian firefighters or members of what were once considered immigrant groups.
“We can’t change the history,” said Hopwood. “It was a house for a very wealthy white family. But we want to have people see themselves on the wall — people from Newark, people from elsewhere — and to break this idea that historic houses are only for...”
Hopwood halted at that point, searching for the right words.
“Rich white people,” someone suggested.
“Yeah,” she said.
The reinterpretation of the Ballantine House, a National Historic Landmark, was completed under the museum’s outgoing director and CEO, Linda Harrison, who will step down effective May 31. On Wednesday, the museum will break ground on a major expansion and development project shepherded by Harrison during her six-year tenure. It will include new and reconfigured gallery space and construction of 200 market rate and 50 affordable apartments on the museum’s 4-acre downtown campus.
A Ballantine-related development is nearing completion on the site of the company’s last active brewery in Newark’s Ironbound section, a 280-unit apartment complex known as “The Ballantine.”
A particularly vibrant example of the mansion’s reinterpretation is the first-floor dining room, which contains an installation titled “Party Time: Reimagine America” by British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare.
The piece imagines a 19th-century dinner party, with period-correct furnishings, flatware and faux food on a lavishly set dining table surrounded by eight headless, carousing mannequins, standing, sitting and leaning back, drinking wine, and gesturing boldly, all dressed in the style of the day, but in “vibrantly patterned African fabric” known as Dutch wax cloth.
“‘Party Time’ may be seen as a celebration of African diasporic communities in a setting that would have excluded them,” reads the installation’s interpretive statement.
On the mansion’s second floor, the master bedroom contains a 19th-century bed with an ornately carved walnut headboard. It faces the bedroom door, where waist-high plexiglass panels limit how far into the room visitors can venture.
There are no mannequins in the bedroom, but over the mantle above the fireplace is a 1971 life-sized impressionist painting of two people sitting up under the covers titled, “Black Couple in Bed Looking at TV,” by Dmitri Wright, an artist born in Newark and later based in Greenwich, Connecticut.
“This was one of our signature interpretations,” Hopwood said of the juxtaposition of the 1970s couple and 19th-century bed.
The western edge of the museum property runs along University Avenue, and students from Rutgers-Newark and New Jersey Institute of Technology are frequent visitors.
John Mondaruli, a freshman at NJIT, was there Thursday seeking inspiration for a paper he had to write. Mondaruli, 19, of Lake Hopatcong, said he wasn’t aware that the mansion had been reimagined to more closely reflect the Newark of today. But he was glad to hear it.
“Historical accuracy, I think, should be one of the priorities,” Mondaruli said. “But making sure everyone can come see the thing is also very high up there.”
Ashley Catanho, 21, a senior at Rutgers-Newark, was also at the museum for a research-writing assignment. It was her first time there.
“Everything’s beautiful,” said Catanho, a marketing major. “There’s so much detail, and there’s so much to look at. I’m going to have to come back four or five times.”
In the “Stay” Black History exhibit, the three women featured were “as respected in Newark’s Black community as the Ballantines were in theirs,” Williams, who directs the African-American History Program of the New Jersey Historical Commission, wrote of the exhibit.
The artist in Williams overlaid lace fabric on large photographs of the women for a textured, period effect and created a street grid atop a lightbox to illuminate the physical proximity of the women in a downtown neighborhood inhabited by more prosperous and civilly active members of that period’s Black community.
Ellen King (1839-1936) was an early Black educator who grew up in what Williams called “the world of Black liberation that her parents built.” She was exposed from an early age to people fleeing enslavement who took refuge in the King family home on Plane Street — now University Avenue — which the National Park Service officially designated a stop on the Underground Railroad in 2022.
Sara O’Fake Evans, who died at 37 in 1906, was the daughter of the wealthy, politically active, and musically talented O’Fake family in Newark, who owned several houses in the neighborhood surrounding the Ballantine mansion.
Hannah Mandeville (1811-1902) had been enslaved in Jersey City before finding freedom, marriage and children in Newark, where she was active in the Plane Street Colored Church, a key institution in Newark’s fight for racial justice. But Mandeville’s life of triumph over enslavement had a sad final chapter when Williams said she “was unjustly forced out of the home she owned into the street with her belongings.”
“These leaders have been pushed out of historical narratives — until now,” Williams writes in materials accompanying the exhibit. “They changed their lives in the face of misogyny, racism and worker discrimination, and their stories illuminate our centuries-long struggle. Even today, Black women continue to fight and thrive in Newark.”
Olivia O’Neilly, another NJIT freshman at the museum on Thursday, said she was supposed to write about an exhibit of her choice for a research writing assignment. She picked “Stay,” she said, because of how “unheard of” the achievements of the three women were for their time.
“I think it’s very important to recognize what they accomplished, especially back then,” said O’Neilly, who’s from upstate Niskayuna, New York. “When I was walking in, I saw a group of elementary students, and seeing things like this, I think, can be very inspiring.”
Stories by Steve Strunsky
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Steve Strunsky may be reached at sstrunsky@njadvancemedia.com