Free as they want to be:
Artists Committed to Memory
Co-curated by Cheryl Finley • Deborah Willis
“Freedom is not something that anybody can be given;
freedom is something people take,
and people are as free as they want to be.”
— James Baldwin
'Free as they want to be' at NURFC, 2022, image by Tony Walsh
Daesha Devón Harris, "I want to cross over (I Love these words Liberty, Justice, Freedom)", Summer 2016 From Just Beyond the River, video installation, 30:33, courtesy of the artist
Hank Willis Thomas, "Exodus", 2019, lenticular, Gordon Parks Foundation
Bisa Butler, "The Storm, the Whirlwind, and the Earthquake", 2020, textile reproduction, image courtesy of the Toledo Museum of Art (Toledo, OH)
Yelaine Rodriguez, From "Mal De Ojo: Point B of The Door of No Return", 2022, analog photograph, courtesy of artist
Untitled (Dad, 1966 and 1968), Sadie Barnette, chromogenic prints, 2016, courtesy of the artist and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco; image by John Wilson White
Adama Delphine Fawundu Let Us Guide Our Destiny, In the Face of History Series, 2018, courtesy of the artist and HESSE FLATOW, New York
Wendel A. White, "Ambrotype of Frederick Douglass, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC", 2016/2019, pigment inkjet on paper, courtesy of the artist
Terry Adkins, "Miy Paluk" 1866, 2012, single-channel digital video with sound, courtesy of The Estate of Terry Adkins and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
Anonymous, "Portrait of a woman," c. 1870s, sixth-plate tintype, from tintype album, collection of Cheryl Finley
William Earle Williams, "Interior, Fort Morgan, Battle Site, Mobile Bay, Alabama", 2003, gelatin silver print, courtesy of the artist
Free as they want to be: Artists Committed to Memory presents contemporary art inspired by historical memory. The exhibition considers in comparative perspectives the historic and contemporary role photography and film have played in remembering legacies of slavery and its aftermath. It also examines the social lives of a diverse group of Americans within various places—on the land, at home, in photographic albums, at historic sites, and in public memory. Including nineteenth-century photographs made by Cincinnati studio photographer James Presley Ball and other photographs of Black Americans taken during the ongoing struggle for freedom, Free as they want to be offers a view of a people who expressed their desire to be free in early photographic portraits.
This exhibition acknowledges artists’ ongoing efforts to explore the possibilities of freedom and their relationship to it. Their subject matter depicts the persistent quest to be “as free as they want to be” as well as their persistent drive to innovate aesthetic practices in photographic media. Free as they want to be addresses the making and uses of photographic archives, the narratives they tell and the parameters that define them as objects of study. Social and economic histories as well as experiences of race, class, gender and sexuality affect the construction, acquisition and maintenance of archives and their ability to influence knowledge production. This exhibition includes artists working in photography, video, projection, sculpture and mixed media installation. Their strength and determination are documented in their wide-ranging themes and aesthetic practices supported by a fierce engagement with archival research. The exhibition creates a framework in which to reimagine and reflect on historical events, as well as public and personal memory.
This exhibition engages numerous educational themes including the legacy of racism, segregation and slavery in American culture, and the ability to understand and overcome injustice. It will inspire conversations about contemporary racial and ethnic diversity, migration and identity, the slave trade and the African diaspora.
WORKS
+/- 75 objects; 5 videos
DIMENSIONS
Various
SPACE REQUIREMENTS
515 linear feet (156 linear meters)
INQUIRIES
exhibitions@curatorial.org | 626.577.0044
FEE
Please inquire.
VENUES
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University | Ithaca, New York
September 6 – December 7, 2025
Clark Atlanta University Art Museum | Atlanta, Georgia
September 19 – December 12, 2024
ARTISTS CURRENTLY REPRESENTED
Terry Adkins, Radcliffe Bailey, J.P. Ball Studio, Sadie Barnette, Sheila Pree Bright, Bisa Butler, Omar Victor Diop, Nona Faustine, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Daesha Devón Harris, Isaac Julien, Catherine Opie, Yelaine Rodriguez, Hank Willis Thomas, Lava Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems, Wendel White, William Earle Williams, Deborah Willis
ABOUT THE CURATORS
Cheryl Finley, Ph.D., is Director of the Atlanta University Center Art History + Curatorial Studies Collective, Distinguished Visiting Professor of Art History at Spelman College and Associate Professor at Cornell University. Committed to engaging strategic partners to transform the art and culture industry, she leads an innovative undergraduate program at the world’s largest HBCU consortium in preparing the next generation of African American museum and visual arts professionals. She is a curator, contemporary art critic, and award-winning author noted for Committed to Memory: the Art of the Slave Ship Icon (Princeton, 2018), the first in-depth study of the most famous image associated with the memory of slavery—a schematic engraving of a packed slave ship hold—and the art, architecture, poetry, and film it has inspired since its creation in Britain in 1788. Dr. Finley’s current book project, Black Art Futures, offers a roadmap of the global art economy, focusing on the relationship among artists, museums, biennials, and migration.
Deborah Willis, Ph.D., is University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She is the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the author of The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship and Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present, among other publications. Professor Willis’ curated exhibitions include: Framing Moments in the Kalamazoo Institute of the Arts; Migrations and Meanings in Art at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery; and Reframing Beauty: Intimate Moments at Indiana University.
