Freedomways: From Jubilee to Juneteenth​

I am an invisible man… When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.” 

– Ralph Ellison 

The tension between visibility and invisibility pervades the latest selections on view in the John H. Motley Study, featuring works from the permanent collection of both The Amistad Center for Art & Culture and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. Surveying the African American landscape, each artist examines a specific moment in the historical canon and how it has informed their individual experiences in the United States. Moody and challenging, this installation urges viewers to consider the remarkable agency of Black Americans in response to cruelty. 

Anne Dunbar’s Portrait Bust of Cinque remains one of the most important objects from the Randolph Linsly Simpson collection in how it defines the role of The Amistad Center: to provide visibility and context for those who have been excluded throughout history. Actualized at Yale University in 1932, this bust of Sengbe Pieh-commonly referred to as Joseph Cinque-memorializes the Mende man who led the 1839 uprising on La Amistad slave ship. The violence of overtaking a crew of seamen, two Cuban plantation owners, and the ship’s cook with sugar cane machetes was a response to one of the most nefarious impositions: the transatlantic slave trade. To further expose the abhorrent conditions in which forcefully captured Africans emigrated to the West Indies and America, this bust is paired with a slave ship lithograph published in New York City.  

The US practice of enslaving people from Africa was made illegal on 1 January, 1808, yet the lithograph is dated 1836 suggesting an abolitionist agenda. What is most provocative about Dunbar’s bust is her realizing of Pieh’s humanity, transforming the famed 1840 mezzotint print by Nathaniel Jocelyn into tangible non-fiction and recognized personhood which exists now as freestanding plaster, a testament to Black resilience when faced with inhumanity. 

Although the transatlantic slave trade was abolished in the early 19th century, the American economy continued to thrive under enslaved labor. J.P. Morgan Chase released a statement in 2005 acknowledging their role in the slave trade as they would hold over thirteen-thousand enslaved African Americans as collateral for loans between 1831 and 1865. Referencing the historical commodification of Black bodies and labor, collaborators Hank Willis Thomas and Ryan Alexiev created three “credit cards” highlighting the systemic racism that is very much embedded into the economy. Thomas and Alexiev pair familiar banking iconography with the intentional use of numbers that recall specific dates in the historical canon such as the recorded start date of slavery and cardholder names including William Lynch, Christopher Columbus, and Thomas himself.  

Lorna Simpson’s Counting also addresses issues of Black labor and enslavement. Through the process of photogravure, an intaglio print-making process which produces tonally conscious, smooth prints, Simpson sets an anonymous Black figure above a South Carolina smokehouse once used to house the enslaved, and a protective hair style. She has integrated text, which is poetically vague, possibly suggesting the amount of time and physical labor that has been imposed upon visible, yet unidentifiable Black subjects and ambiguous sites connected to enslavement. These works, juxtaposed with Glenn Ligon’s Runaways series, create an interesting commentary on the systems that have shaped the Black experience in America. Runaways are a portfolio of ten prints adapted from 19th century runaway slave advertisements, published by plantation owners to recover enslaved people who escaped captivity. The language seen on each print was written by Thomas’ friends. Each one was asked to write an advertisement as if they were filling out a missing person’s report on Ligon himself. The typography and graphics of Runaways are appropriated from preexisting newspaper ads and anti-slavery materials.  

Ashante Kindle, Carrie Mae Weems, Donald Boudreaux, Lyle Ashton Harris, and Richard Hunt are also included in this rotation with works that offset the heavier themes of enslavement. Kindle’s Dark & Lovely (Nocturnal Grace) critiques hair products which disproportionately affect women of African descent and Weems deconstructs societal assumptions about dysfunctional family structures by centering the loving bonds she shares with hers. Most notably, pantomime performance meets photography in Lyle Ashton Harris’ Americas: Kym, Lyle & Crinoline where the artist challenges the complicated hierarchies of skin tone and social constructs around sexuality. But it is Ligon, however, who brings us back with White #15, a text-based stencil painting which features nearly illegible text. Ligon includes excerpts from Richard Dyer’s essays on the invisibility of whiteness—as in being white makes one the invisible default causing non-white racialized groups to become the visible “other”. Ligon cleverly combines Dyer’s words with text from Ellison’s 1947 novel The Invisible Man and ironically obscures Ellison’s words with his clever use of black paint leaving the act of “seeing” up to the viewer.