To celebrate the diverse history of the Southside neighborhood of Ithaca, the Cornell-Ithaca Partnership (C-IP) will sponsor a free exhibit and public reading from a new play as part of its neighborhood history initiative.

The exhibit, "This is Home … A Southside Living Room," is a representation of a contemporary Southside neighborhood living room. It will be in the Artspace of downtown Ithaca's Clinton House, 116 N. Cayuga St., for the month of November, and there will be an opening reception for the exhibit Friday, Nov. 2, at 5:30 p.m. in the lobby at the Clinton House. The public is invited to meet the families that participated. In addition, a reading from the play "Reflections: Our Stories Told Our Way," written from the words of residents of the community, will take place Wednesday, Nov. 14, from 7:30 to 9 p.m. at the Kitchen Theatre; it is free and open to the public.

These projects are the results of conversations Cornell University art and anthropology students have had with community residents. The interviews led to the documented accounts of the lives of some African-American families in Ithaca and were developed into the community-based play. The stories of family and neighborhood life also inspired other C-IP projects to recognize, preserve and celebrate the diverse history of the Southside neighborhood, says Ifrecak Miller, arts programs coordinator for C-IP. For example, Cornell student Ingrid Bauer, a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences, has researched the neighborhood's African-American heritage. Her booklets, "A Snapshot of African American Life in Ithaca," which describes the community during the first half of the 20th century, and "A Research Guide to the History of African Americans in Ithaca and Tompkins County," are part of the exhibit. "The exhibit is an accompaniment to the community history, the oral histories and the play. It is another step in the campus-community partnership effort to build bridges and share information," says Patricia Pollak, director of C-IP, one of the approximately 70 active U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development-sponsored Community Outreach Partnership Centers nationwide. Pollak is an associate professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell.

"Since this public installation is something both private and public of a space both unique and yet ordinary, it became clear to all of us working on it that the 'typical' Southside living room is, actually, extraordinary and unique," says Miller, who coordinated the project. "Each family uses the space differently to represent who they are and who they would like to be. With this in mind, we wanted this living room to be representative and reflective of a number of different homes in the Southside neighborhood. It is not one home, but everyone's home. It shows the diversity in our community as well as the commonality."

Thirteen community families and several Cornell students participated in developing the exhibit. Families contributed personal items from their homes and their reflections of life in Ithaca; Cornell students did the documentation and staged the installation. Tony Zuniga, a senior in the College of Human Ecology, photographed and interviewed each family about its contributions to the installation. Catherine M. Ponte, a senior art history major, used the photographs to design the floor plan and layout of the room exhibit, and volunteers from the student-run On-Site Volunteer Services helped pack, move and arrange the room.

The Cornell-Ithaca Partnership was established to foster collaboration between Cornell and Ithaca's downtown neighborhoods. Currently C-IP supports several programs to address those goals, including: Lite House Repairs, Computer All Stars and MVPs, the Campus Connection summer youth program, and the Southside neighborhood history projects.

For more information about this and other C-IP programs, contact partnership staff at (607) 216-0510 or e-mail COPC@cornell.edu.