The Home Project - A Journey Back to the Future

Home is an idea so central to our lives that we often don't stop to consider what it means. The Home Project, a multicultural, interarts installation involving original artifacts, visual arts, photography, film, music, and literature, explored this important theme through related interactive audience experiences designed for various rooms of the Robeson County Railroad Depot. Under the direction of June Guralnick, professional artists, and children and adults from North Carolina and New York City, collaborated together to create this special work. (Artists included Cici Stevens, Rikki Asher, Ginny Tyler, Ray Owen, Emily Whittle, and Hugh Robertson. "Readings from Home" participants included novelist Jill McCorkle, NC Poet Laureate Sam Ragan, St. Andrew's College Writer-in-Residence Ron Bayes, Barbara Brayboy-Locklear, Indian Education Resource Center, Mamie Pope, and Pembroke University's Shelby Stephenson.)

National Endowment for the Arts
Nexus Contemporary Art Center
North Carolina Arts Council Interdisciplinary Program
North Carolina Humanities Council
Robeson County Arts Council
Private Donations

From the "I Remember When" book
(created by visitors to the Home Project)

"I remember when we used to sit for hours on my grandmother's long front porch. Folks would talk to each other across the narrow street, their voices echoing into the summer dusk. Cars would lumber down the street and stop in front of houses and the drivers would chat for ten or twenty minutes. They talked of those who were born, those who had died and who was running around with so and so's wife or husband. In the far distance there was always heat lightning brightening the undersides of clouds. Soon the street would go quiet and you could hear a dog bark in the next county." Anonymous contributor

"The Home Project is roughly divided into three rooms…In the Buried Room… Ms. Guralnick unearths memories of home that may have been buried or forgotten. Their [senior citizens] taped voices rise and fade like ghosts, set against a haunting musical score and the occasional lonesome wail of a train whistle. Simultaneously, historical photographs and images of decaying barns and abandoned cars flash on a large screen…"
The News & Observer 

"The project is designed to be an ever changing reflection of what home means to the people of Robeson County, with some rooms demanding the viewer's personal perspective as a 'ticket' to gain entry…."The Robesonian

"Writer Thomas Wolfe turned "you can't go home again" into a cliché. Artist June Guralnick turned it into a lie. For two weeks now, Ms. Guralnick has been taking people back home-those who have left-and making home more intimate to those who have not. She is doing it through art." The Fayetteville Observer

To view photographs from the installation, click here. 

If you have a flash enabled browser and a fast connection, you can view a slide show of photographs from the installation here. 

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