In close collaboration with the Erie Canal Harbor Development Corporation, The Buffalo History Museum, Indigenous advisors and contributors, and local historians, Local Projects has designed an exhibition space entitled Waterway of Change: Complex Legacies of the Erie Canal, and site-specific activations that will activate the Canalside neighborhood and provide a backdrop for a range of events commemorating the Erie Canal Bicentennial.
Experiences are distributed across several Canalside locations. The Longshed serves as visitors’ primary orientation to the history and legacies of the Erie Canal. Outdoor Installations at the Ruins and Main Canal provide visitors with site-specific stories that tie together past and present.
The Waterway of Change: Complex Legacies of the Erie Canal exhibition begins with a dynamic projected video program that roots visitors in the history of the Erie Canal. Grounding visitors in time and place, it introduces topics that will continue to weave through the exhibition, including Indigenous Peoples’ experiences before Canal construction and the devastating consequences of digging the Canal through Haudenosaunee homelands. It also touches on challenges overcome by Canal engineers and laborers and highlights how transformative the Erie Canal was in networks of trade, exchange, and settlement.
Silhouettes mirroring the complex system of 83 locks that allowed the canal to travel across varied terrain from Albany to Buffalo anchor “Surveying Impact” where visitors can explore stories of the Erie Canal’s impact through 3D models and interactive touch screens.
At the edges of the exhibits, “Perspectives on the Canal” offers artistic displays, artifacts, and touch screens that dive deeper into how women, black and indigenous populations, and canal workers were impacted by the Erie Canal through their neighborhoods, stories, music, food, traditions, and advocacy. Collaborations with indigenous consultants create a particularly deep sense of intimacy with both the objects and stories contained in this section.
Light is used as a design language throughout the exhibit itself, where different chapters and perspectives of history are illuminated through different lenses. This idea is embodied quite literally in the images above. Two projectors cast two images onto the same surface. By gazing through differently polarized lenses, visitors see contrasts play out between indigenous and colonial peoples, rich and poor, and see views of the canal before and after its construction.
In “A Canal of Networks,” visitors explore their own relationship to the region, underneath a canopy of illuminated cubes representing historic figures and sites, and an installation of internally illuminated cubes.
Visitors can choose from a series of postcards honoring beloved contemporary attractions across Western New York alongside historic sites, and either take them home or answer a prompt on the back of a postcard as their contribution to the exhibit.
Doorways to the Canal and Canalside’s Past
Inspired by historic structures that once stood on the Canalside, five doorway-like outdoor installations at Canalside are portals to the Erie Canal’s enduring impact. Discover Indigenous, Black, and immigrant stories, the entertainment and vice of the Canal District, and the commerce at the Western Terminus that shaped our world today.
