# @chapelboronews on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DH3qUmbuYL-
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/28558663-chapelboronews-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/9cecb0a9a8.jpg
- **Posted:** 2025-03-31T16:02:30.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Chapelboro.com (@chapelboronews) — https://gondola.cc/chapelboronews

## Caption

Maps are storytellers, but they can exclude certain narratives.

UNC graduate student Fowota Mortoo said that’s the case for Chapel Hill’s Black builders. Although instrumental in designing and constructing UNC’s buildings, walls, and pathways, she said their contributions to the university often go unnoticed. Her 12-square-foot map of UNC became a way to look not only at the history of campus buildings, but the local faces who built them.

“The four families that I focused on were the Jones, Barbee, Blacknell, and Johnson families,” Mortoo recently told 97.9 The Hill. “I was interested in looking at The Carolina Inn, The Forest Theatre, the dentistry school, and sort of piecing together these specific families’ connections to those specific places.”

The paper map layers archival photos and a hand-drawn maze, with the names and faces of the four families embedded on the specific spaces each were integral in creating. Unveiled at the Seymour Center this month, the UNC PhD student said she initially created the piece for Wilson Library’s Student Artist Awards, which allows students to use its historical and archival materials for a creative project. 

“And so I eventually gathered archival photos, also engaged with some of the oral histories in the Jackson Center, to piece together what I refer to as a map in that it’s really about orienting us to those histories and putting a focus on stories that have often been excluded from the stories on campus.”

Full story on Chapelboro.com.
.
.
.
.
.
.
#chapelhill #unc #unchistory

## Stats

- **Views:** 0
- **Likes:** 227
- **Shares:** 0
- **Comments:** 1

## Tags

unchistory, chapelhill, unc

---
Copyright (c) Gondola