New Exhibit Focuses on “The Inner Passage” to Freedom

The National Humanities Center (NHC) is pleased to announce The Inner Passage: Photographs by Virginia McGee Richards, on display beginning September 8. 

Drawn from Richards’ acclaimed photographic and narrative history, The Inner Passage: An Untold Story of Black Resistance Along a Southern Waterway (MIT Press, 2026), the exhibit features large-scale black-and-white photographs documenting a 300-mile network of eighteenth-century hand-cut canals spanning the Lowcountry of South Carolina down to St. Augustine, Florida. Originally constructed through the brutal forced labor of enslaved Africans using shovels and axes to serve plantation commerce, these waterways represent a historic paradox, as enslaved Black people navigated these very canals as covert, life-saving routes to self-emancipation in Spanish Florida for over a century.

To capture the living, historical memory embedded in the Inner Passages landscape, Richards—a photographer, historian, and former environmental lawyer—used a wooden large-format camera and the nineteenth-century wet-plate collodion process. The labor-intensive analog technique produces haunting, atmospheric images on chemically treated glass plates, mirroring the shifting tides and fluid history of the Lowcountry. The exhibit blends quiet landscape portraits of ancient live oak “witness trees” and cypress swamps with intimate portraits of living descendants whose families have maintained deep ties to the land for generations.

“Landscapes are like manuscripts,” says Richards. “They record, they hold, and they can render histories—even in the absence of documents.”

Presented in partnership with the Research Triangle Foundation, this show marks the National Humanities Center’s first public exhibition since the COVID-19 pandemic. To celebrate, the Center will host a special event on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, from 5:30 to 7:00 p.m. ET. The program will feature a public conversation between the artist and NHC president and director Blair LM Kelley, followed by a public artist reception.

“We are thrilled to welcome visitors back into our building for our first exhibition in six years,” said Dr. Kelley. “Virginia McGee Richards’ powerful work exemplifies some of the things the humanities do: recovering hidden histories and revealing how the lives of those who came before us can be found in familiar places, sometimes quite literally carved into the land that surrounds us. We are deeply grateful to the Research Triangle Foundation for their partnership in bringing this timely project to our community.”

About the Artist

Virginia McGee Richards is a photographer, historian, and former environmental lawyer whose work explores landscape as a living archive. Born and raised in the Carolinas, she grew up immersed in Southern geographies and rural life—formative experiences that anchor her artistic practice. Her work has been published in Smithsonian magazine, the William & Mary Quarterly, the MIT Press Reader, and Now Voyager.

About the National Humanities Center

Located in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, the National Humanities Center is the world’s only independent institute dedicated exclusively to advanced study in all areas of the humanities. The Center provides fellowships and other research support to leading scholars, offers professional development opportunities and classroom resources for teachers, and offers public programming designed to foster deeper understanding of the human experience.

About the Research Triangle Foundation

The Research Triangle Foundation of North Carolina manages Research Triangle Park (RTP), the largest research park in the United States. RTF is dedicated to supporting education, economic development, and philanthropic endeavors that enrich the Triangle region and support groundbreaking cultural and scientific initiatives.