Artist and writer Neill Bogan has chosen to explore the lost history of Sweet Briar College, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Mt. San Angelo estate. Bogan is particularly interested in the idea of local community relations and the effect that race has on those relations.

Neill Bogan is a writer and producer who specializes in site-specific theater and public art projects centered on the issues of place, memory, and history.

Those who will be working with Neill Bogan will include Sweet Briar students and faculty of arts management , anthropology, art, art history, history, film studies, the college art gallery, and anyone else interested; other participants will include local residents, Amherst County public schools, and neighboring African-American churches.

This historical project is designed to connect the white, black, and Monocan Indian communities through work done by a variety of participants under Bogan's leadership. Bogan wishes to give the community a sense of their own history and a desire to continue exploring and representing it with new tools of artistic research and critical practices.

The VCCA, which serves as a link between the surrounding American and African American community as well as the Monocan Indian community, is located on Mt. San Angelo, owned by Sweet Briar College. Neill Bogan is the Sweet Briar/VCCA Fellow for the month of April, 1998.

For four years, Neill Bogan wrote and co-produced for the Jottay Theater with Janie Geiser, adapting The Third Bank of the River for puppets and actors and co-creating Stories from Here. Bogan is the author of fourteen plays and dozens of songs; he has received two Citations for Excellence from UNIMA (Union Internationale de la Marionette), the world puppetry body, and two Gold Record Awards for songwriting.

Bogan has written on arts and issues for Vibe, American Theater, and the Atlanta Constitution, among others. He has received numerous grants and has been a fellow of The Writers' Room, The Blue Mountain Center, the BMI/Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Bogan is also a 14-year member of the Alternate ROOTS and a faculty member of its Community Arts Partnership Institute. Alternate ROOTS was founded in 1976 and is a membership organization run by and for Southeastern performing artists who are creating original work in the region.

Since 1991, Bogan has been a part of REPOhistory. REPOhistory means "repossessing history." Based in New York City, it is a collection of 65 visual artists, performers, writers, historians, teachers, and filmmakers who came together three years ago with the goal of creating public art projects and workshops about lost and unacknowledged history and providing people with a new view. Past projects include sign projects, video documentary, personal narratives, books, gallery installations, or public interventions.

In 1995, Bogan conceived and co-directed a REPOhistory community residency in Atlanta's Old Fourth Ward entitled Entering Buttermilk Bottom. This project was commissioned by the 1995 Arts Festival of Atlanta.

Buttermilk Bottom was one of America's roughest and most vibrant African- American ghettos. During the 1960s Buttermilk Bottom was wiped out by an onslaught of sky-scrapping urbanization which was to pave the way for a new, more grand city of Atlanta, Buttermilk Bottom was gone by the 1970s.Map by Jim Costanzo

The REPOhistory project recreated this lost neighborhood through works by a group of Atlanta and New York artists; it brought up the issues of population growth and racial segregation. Signs were placed near the former boundaries of Buttermilk Bottom, 18 historic markers were situated in the surrounding area, and a diagram of the lost streets and houses was painted on a parking lot at the Atlanta Civic Center. On the right is a map of the recreated neighborhood.

Another REPOhistory project which Neill Bogan participated in was the Lower Manhattan Sign Project of 1992, sponsored by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

The project consisted of 39 two-sided metal signs that were hung mainly on lampposts at 32 sites in Lower Manhattan. The subjects of these signs included the Ellis Island Immigration station, the Great Negro Plot of 1741, the first Chinese community in New York City, and the story of the waterfront. One issue of this project was to make history and multiculturalism more accessible to the public.

Questions and comments may be directed to Rebecca Massie-Lane, Director of the College Galleries and the Arts Management Program, and to Neill Bogan.