Royal Palace of Naples welcomes home of African-American activist Rosa Parks to its courtyard

The Cortile d’Onore of the Royal Palace of Naples hosts until January 6, 2021, the installation entitled Almost Home - The Rosa Parks House Project by U.S. artist Ryan Mendoza (New York, 1971). The project was realized with the support of the Campania Region and thanks to the collaboration between the Fondazione Morra Greco and the Campania Regional Museums Directorate, intending to promote culture as a tool for social inclusion and to make people reflect on the theme of human rights.

The Courtyard therefore features and can be visited the home ofAfrican American activist Rosa Parks who, by refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger, initiated the boycott of transportation in the city of Montgomery in 1955, becoming a symbol of the struggle for the civil rights of African Americans.

Ryan Mendoza recovered and saved Rosa Parks’ house, originally located in Detroit, from demolition.In 2016, Mendoza took the house with him, protecting it from neglect, and reassembled it in the backyard of his home in Berlin. Long abandoned, the house had first been purchased by Rosa Parks’ granddaughter Rhea McCauley, who did not have enough money to renovate it and raised funds, but to no avail.

She thus approached Mendoza to donate the house to him after learning of his project The White House, in which the artist had repurposed the facade of an uninhabited Detroit home, repainting it white, and then exhibiting it at Art Rotterdam. Understanding the importance of the house as a symbol of the relationship between history and collective memory, Mendoza took Parks’ house with him and, after exhibiting it in Berlin and Providence at the WaterFire Arts Center, brought it to Naples. Mendoza had moved to the Neapolitan city in 1992, where he lived and worked at the Morra Greco Foundation before it became a foundation. Naples has thus been Mendoza’s home for about fifteen years and is now almost the home of the Rosa Parks House project. The artist would like Parks’ house to one day return to its place of origin, where the event took place that caused the great mobilization of the African American community in Montgomery.

With the Almost Home - The Rosa Parks House Project, Ryan Mendoza intends to keep alive the memory of Rosa Parks and all those who inhabited the house during a dramatic and conflicted time in American history, whose identity, now called into question by Black Lives Matter, is now in question.

Inside the house, for the duration of the installation, a tribute to George Floyd will be played: a song lasting 8 minutes and 46 seconds, the time George Floyd spent with the policeman’s knee on his neck before he died.

The installation is open to the public daily, except Wednesdays, from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Free admission.

Royal Palace of Naples welcomes home of African-American activist Rosa Parks to its courtyard

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