#reflectionsonliberty

This July, we’re examining how artists in the Brooklyn Museum collection have dissected liberty, as a monument and as a concept, in the context of the United States.

The legacy of slavery continues to inform how we come to know space and place. Nona Faustine animates erased histories of slavery by using her own body as a medium to connect the present to the past. In this image from her White Shoes series, Faustine situates herself at The Lefferts House in Brooklyn, located in what is now Prospect Park, where stolen and enslaved Africans lived in bondage. The white shoes represent the sexual economy that marked enslaved Black women as commodified flesh—the simultaneous regulation and violation of their reproductive capacity under the system of slavery. 

This July, we’re examining how artists in the Brooklyn Museum collection have dissected liberty, as a monument and as a concept, in the context of the United States.

Dread Scott describes his work as “revolutionary art to propel history forward.” Scott’s 2014 performance, On the Impossibility of Freedom in a Country Founded on Slavery and Genocide, highlights the foundational hypocrisy of a nation claiming "liberty and justice for all," but never reckoning with the violence against Black and Indigenous people that r sanctioned its economic and geographic expansion. During the performance, the artist is repeatedly pushed backward as he attempts to walk directly into the pressurized jet of a fire hose. Fire hoses were used by police to dispel and suppress peaceful anti-segregation protesters, including children, during the 1963 Civil Rights campaign in Birmingham, Alabama. Scott also employs the "hands up, don't shoot" gesture that emerged as a symbol against police violence following the 2014 killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and is echoed today in continuing Black Lives Matter protests. (Today marks 50 consecutive days of protests in New York.) By collapsing 20th-century movements and present-day activism, Scott asks us to remember and learn from these legacies, as we carry them forward.

This July, we’re examining how artists in the Brooklyn Museum collection have dissected liberty, as a monument and as a concept, in the context of the United States.

In the series 1880 Crow Peace Delegation, Wendy Red Star brings to light a nationwide ignorance of Indigenous cultures in the United States. This image of Medicine Crow was originally taken by Charles Milton Bell during a historic meeting between the Crow delegation and the U.S. settler government, resulting in railroad expansion that encroached into Crow land rights. The portraits circulated, leaving the sitter and nation unidentified, helping to perpetuate an easily-appropriated, stereotyped view of Native Americans. By annotating reproductions of these images with details of the sitter’s achievements, regalia, and life experiences, Red Star reasserts and educates non-indigenous viewers on the individuality of Medicine Crow. She states, “I want people to realize that the images of Medicine Crow are more than just a handsome Native man. The images represent a human being, a reservation era chief, the forming of the Crow Indian reservation, the loss of Crow lands, the changing of a people, the resilience of a culture.”

This July, we’re examining how artists in the Brooklyn Museum collection have dissected liberty, as a monument and as a concept, in the context of the United States. 

Stacy Lynn Waddell infuses bodily presence and lived experience to examine historic erasure of Black achievements in traditional monuments. The artist exalts “M.H.,” performance artist and sculptor Maren Hassinger, atop a plinth in place of Confederate General Beauregard whose statue was removed from New Orleans, during their residency at the Joan Mitchell Center in 2017.

Waddell utilizes gold and aluminum leaf, perhaps as a nod to heraldic traditions, while her painstaking linework reflects the laborious technique of monolithic creations. As monument removal becomes increasingly pressing in the current Black Lives Matter movement, Waddell’s work tempts the viewer to question: 

What would the world look like if we amplified the voices of Black women?

When asked, in 1985, “What is liberty?,” James Baldwin suggested that one could quote the Declaration of Independence, but went on to say: “Liberty is the individual passion or will to be free, but this passion, this will is always contradicted by the necessities of the state, everywhere, for as long as we’ve heard of mankind, as long as we’ve heard of states. … For a Black American, for a Black inhabitant of this country, the Statue of Liberty is simply a very bitter joke, meaning nothing to us.” 

This July, we’ll examine how artists in the Brooklyn Museum collection have dissected liberty, as a monument and as a concept, in the context of the United States.

This July, we’re examining how artists in the Brooklyn Museum collection have dissected liberty, as a monument and as a concept, in the context of the United States.

In 1974, Stevie Wonder’s hit single “You Haven’t Done Nothin’” emerged just two days before Richard Nixon announced his resignation of office. The song houses charged lyrics, vocal accompaniment from the Jackson 5, and instrumental influence from Funk, Jazz, and West African percussion. Such aggregate musical forms heavily influenced artists like Napoleon Jones-Henderson whose weavings and screenprints are self-described as “visual music.” This 1976 screenprint by Jones-Henderson is layered with Black pride references, seen in the tri-color pyramid––a reference to the Pan-African flag. The star-like figures can intend to depict the Ku Klux Klan who was violently against school desegregation and affirmative action in the 1970s.

Jones-Henderson inserts Wonder’s lyrics at the center of the print, while an equally impactful statement is inserted at the far left: a play on The Pledge of Allegiance, Henderson writes “For Which It Stands, It Shall Fall.” Both artists encourage us to question: can the most marginalized communities trust the words of those in power? 

This July, we’re examining how artists in the Brooklyn Museum collection have dissected liberty, as a monument and as a concept, in the context of the United States.

Hank Willis Thomas is a Brooklyn-based artist known for artworks that highlight the Black American experience. This sculpture, titled Liberty, is based on a photograph that appeared in Life Magazine in 1986 and featured a Harlem Globetrotter in front of the Statue of Liberty, spinning a basketball on his finger. In this lifesize sculpture, the ball and arm parallel Liberty’s torch, and allude to the disproportionate way that sports are touted as a path out of systemic poverty, and perhaps to liberty, for Black Americans. To recreate the image, Thomas cast the arm of former NBA All-Star and current coach, Juwan Howard; Howard’s arm is also the source of Thomas’s related public sculpture Unity, located by the Brooklyn Bridge. 

This July, we’re examining how artists in the Brooklyn Museum collection have dissected liberty, as a monument and as a concept, in the context of the United States.

Dindga McCannon, a New York City native, is a self-taught textile and mixed media artist whose art addresses her experiences as a Black woman in America. Active in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 70s, McCannon was one of very few women members of the all-Black Weusi Artist Collective, named after the Swahili word for blackness, and was a founding member of the all-women collective “Where We At” Black Women Artists. Her work is personal, and groundbreaking in the way that she seeks to challenge mainstream narratives of patriarchal, white-centric art by bringing forward her personal and political experiences.. McCannon said of her 1971 Revolutionary Sister, “We didn’t have many women warriors (that we were aware of) so I created my own. Her headpiece is made from recycled mini flag poles. The shape was inspired by my thoughts on the statue of liberty; she represents freedom for so many but what about us (African Americans)?”