“Free as they want to be: Artists Committed to Memory” Calls Upon Remembrance as Act of Liberation

Last week I praised my nephew, Noah, for having such a great memory. He smiled proudly and replied, “Do you have a memory?” Kids have a way of asking simple questions that make us think big.

Just behind the glass entryway to the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center awaits The Storm, the Whirlwind and the Earthquake (2020), artist Bisa Butler’s larger-than-life, ultra-vibrant portrait of Frederick Douglass. The portrait of an American abolitionist that we will always remember sets the tone for “Free as they want to be: Artists Committed to Memory,” on view through June 30. Curated by Black art, history, and culture titans Deborah Willis and Cheryl Finley as well as the Cooper Gallery’s interim director Dell Hamilton, the exhibition moves across time and space to explore race and identity through historic and contemporary photography and film in works by twenty artists. Each of them examines legacies of slavery using an array of sources such as slave narratives, archives, unmarked historic sites, family albums, and public monuments.

Further into the gallery, another version of Frederick Douglass appears. Contemporary photographer Omar Victor Diop fashions himself as Douglass and as abolitionist Olaudah Equiano, respectively, in two portraits from his Diaspora series (2014–2015). Diop’s work pays homage to a popular daguerreotype of the abolitionist made by Samuel J. Miller, playing up the patterned vest and bowtie of the original by adding a background of green and blue paisley. Mirroring Douglass’s stern and dapper appearance, Diop’s rendition incorporates a bright yellow whistle. To the right, a self-assured “Equiano” wears a soccer goalie glove. While incongruous with the times of these famed abolitionists, the whistle and the glove are tools that direct games and determine their outcome—not unlike the voices of these men.

Visitors hear Joan Baez’s 2018 song “Civil War” playing on loop in the gallery. This song’s heavy-keyed piano and acoustic strumming accompanies Deborah Willis’s video installation Reflections on Civil War (2018) in which choreographer Djassi Johnson and dancer Kevin Boseman perform in nineteenth-century costumes to a backdrop of American Civil War–related imagery and contemporary works by the artist and her son, Hank Willis Thomas. The video expands the conventional notion of a civil war to consider gendered relationship dynamics as well as the experiences of Black soldiers on both sides of the war—a topic Willis has extensively researched, having published The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship (2021). Audible throughout the gallery, Baez’s track informs our viewing not just of Willis’s work but the entire show. As Baez sings: “We build this up and we knock this down / We call our little mob a town” and “Every truth carries blame / Every light reveals some shame” she calls the listener to reexamine social constructs, and what is at stake in their making.

A grid of Wendel White’s work covers a wall across from the entrance. This show overlapped with White’s solo show “Manifest: Thirteen Colonies” at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography on the other side of Harvard Yard. Both highlight works from White’s Manifest portfolio, for which he photographs artifacts about race as it is constructed by and represented in American material culture. At the Cooper Gallery, White’s photographs feature an array of objects—a graduation ring with one man’s photograph affixed to it, the Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850), a skull inscribed “Negro,” and several others—that are all photographed singularly and positioned at the center of a black background. Across Manifest, this intended decontextualization of the artifacts queries the unique social implications of each object. However, the images themselves do not sit without context: The site of the exhibition in which they appear shifts the bounds of those implications. Displayed in the Peabody Museum, White’s work challenged the institution’s collection of anthropological materials from within by highlighting objects as tools of change across history and questioning what is preserved and what is not. Whereas alongside the other artworks at the Cooper Gallery, the work commands a form of remembrance that begets our contemporary collective state. The Cooper’s context pushes through a rumination on (and condemnation of) the past, and toward an understanding of how futures are built.

In the back rooms of the gallery, artist Adama Delphine Fawundu makes her own dive into archival material, focusing on Black women as witness. Five individual works use enlarged archival documents including newspapers, advertisements, and the act to increase Harriet Tubman’s pension superimposed onto anti-portraits by, and of, Fawundu. Her figure is positioned with the back of her head to the viewer, challenging the viewer to interpret from the perspective of a Black woman. Bold lettering in one advertisement for the prominent figure of the early twentieth-century Pan-Africanist movement, Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line reads “LET US GUIDE OUR OWN DESTINY,” urging Black people to elevate the race by investing in his shipline. Just above Fawundu’s figure that document reads “DO A MAN’S PART NOW.”

In The Face of History, Freedom Cape (2020), a video nearby that was created during the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, depicts Fawundu wearing a headpiece made of cowrie shells and a cape covered in more images of Black women and historical documents. The artist walks alone to a soundtrack of 100 women speaking on the right to vote, with her cape flowing behind her as she moves through fields, forests, and Brooklyn’s Black Lives Matter mural. Fawundu signals the tension regarding the place of Black women in the women’s and abolitionist movements and later, the civil rights movement. It is a tension that predates Garvey’s shipline and white women’s right to vote, a tension famously posited by Sojourner Truth when she asked, “Ain’t I a Woman?” at the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention and eventually unpacked in the 1982 anthology All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave edited by Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith. It is a tension that resonates in the complexities of allyship present day. 

Fawundu raises our attention to the tension between Black women’s ancestral and experiential knowledge and common perceptions of history. Through this tension Black women refuse to be glossed over, ignored, or neglected in the face of white male hegemony. In our contemporary moment where the right to declare one’s identity is seen as extreme and is in precarity, as LGBTQ rights, women’s health, DEI programs, and birthright citizenship are under attack, the act of remembering and continuing to insist on our own authentic presence is of great importance. That is, to believe and know that we can be as free as we want to be.

Five prints from Sheila Pree Bright’s The Invisible Empire series (2019–2021) point to the eerie beauty of Atlanta, Georgia’s Stone Mountain. A bright white boll of cotton pulls us into a simple still life of rich dark grays and black in Cotton (2019). Resting on a tabletop, the presentation of the plant does not let on the intensity of its history—that comes from memory. William Earl Williams’s eight small gelatin silver prints from his series of photographs Unsung Heroes: African American Soldiers in the Civil War (2009–2020) contrast with Catherine Opie’s large and colorful Untitled #4 Richmond, Virginia (monument/monumental) (2021) in both style and approach. Williams sought out sites that have not been commemorated while Opie documented the defacement of a statue of Robert E. Lee. Together, these artists are invested in showing up and querying the sites we may take for, or accept as, granted.

Memory is the modality through which the past informs the future. To create and sustain ourselves (i.e. to imagine and become who we wish to be) necessitates recollection and reflection. In this time of fervent denial of human rights, it is imperative to remember James Baldwin’s 1960 titular statement: “Freedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.” “Free as they want to be” powerfully asserts memory as essential to the procurement of freedom. To return to my nephew’s question of whether or not I have a memory: Sweet Noah, of course I do.

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“Free as they want to be: Artists Committed to Memory” is a traveling exhibition that was first on view at Clark Atlanta University Art Museum. It’s currently on view through June 30, 2025, at the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research 102 Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge. Next, it will head to Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, followed by Hunter Museum of American Art next fall.