Cleveland Artist to Transform Vintage Bus into Museum of the Great Migration

Cleveland Artist to Transform Vintage Bus into Museum of the Great Migration

Cleveland-based artistRobert Louis Brandon Edwardsis repurposing a 1947 Greyhound bus salvaged from a Pennsylvania junkyard to serve as a museum commemorating the Great Migration. Beginning in about 1910 and ending around 1970, the mass movement saw millions of Black Americans leave the rural South for northern cities, where they hoped to begin new lives free from the Jim Crow laws that enforced segregation and discrimination in the lower states.

The bus was designed by noted French-born American industrial designer Raymond Loewy. Edwards, who in addition to being an artist is a historian and a preservationist, plans to rip out the vehicle’s interior—during the 1970s it was remade as a motor home, with a kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom—and refurbish it to host exhibitions and VR experiences that will allow visitors to learn about the travels and experiences of those who sought to escape racist constraints.

The bus is currently parked outside Cleveland’s William Strudwick Arrasmith–designed Greyhound station, whose sleek, metallic form is a shining example of the Streamline Moderne, post–Art Deco style ascendant in 1948, the year it was completed. The bus station will close later this year and be taken over by Playhouse Square, a local arts education nonprofit with which Edwards is collaborating on the bus museum as part of his Columbia University doctoral studies in historic preservation.

Playhouse Square CEO and president Craig Hassall told the Art Newspaper that the organization had been excited to host Edwards’s project and noted that the repurposed station itself might host programs and exhibitions investigating Ohio’s Black history. Edwards, for his part, intends the museum to be mobile once it’s finished. “Depending on how quickly I can raise the funds to get the bus operational again, I hope to have it on the road by this time next year, and plan to hit all of the major Great Migration destination cities,” he told Artnews.