160 Years After the Emancipation Proclamation, Black Artists Reflect on the Meaning of Freedom
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Within the Amon Carter Museum of American Art’s collection in Fort Worth sits “The Freedman” (1863), by John Quincy Adams Ward, a bronze sculpture dedicated to the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, an all-Black infantry unit of the Civil War. It was erected the same year that the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. Now, 160 years after it was made, the statue serves as a starting point for seven Black contemporary artists to consider the notion of freedom as part of the exhibition “Emancipation: The Unfinished Project of Liberation.” For the interdisciplinary artist Sable Elyse Smith, this means, as she puts it, placing “images of criminality in plain sight” by reformatting the furniture used during prison visits — in this case, turning stools into giant toy jacks. Nearby, Sadie Barnette’s “FBI Drawings” reflect her continued work with her father’s 500-page F.B.I. file: He was a target as a Black Panther working to secure Angela Davis’s freedom in the 1970s. Barnette deconstructs select pages and adds what she describes as “joyful, loving, queer pink and glitter” Hello Kitty graphics and roses. In her series “Bitter Waters Sweet” (2022), the photographer Letitia Huckaby traces the lineage of Africatown, the community just north of Mobile, Ala., where some current inhabitants are related to West Africans who were enslaved and transported to the United States on the Clotilda, the recently excavated slave ship. In documenting the place and its people, Huckaby hopes to convey that “emancipation is not a definitive idea, it’s a process.” “Emancipation” will be on view from March 12 through July 9, cartermuseum.org.