The range and depth of experience represented in “Emancipation: The Unfinished Project of Liberation” at the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) is a vortex arrived to by the layers of observation and research of the curators and represented artists in this expansive exhibition. As the 160th anniversary of the “Emancipation Proclamation” has just past us in 2023, the exhibition examines how emancipation has evolved through a multi-dimensional, cyclical timeline and how its manifestation may appear in the future.
The exhibition is a collaboration between the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas and the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Co-curators Maggie Adler, Curator of Paintings, Sculpture and Works on Paper at the Carter, and Maurita Poole, Executive Director of the Newcomb Art Museum at Tulane University have chosen seven contemporary Black artists who were invited to interpret John Quincy Adams Ward’s bronze sculpture, “The Freedman,” from the Carter Museum’s collection. In addition, at WCMA, curators Destinee Filmore and Kevin Murphy explore the Massachusetts connection to abolition with historical references and objects from the museum’s collection and those from other local venues.
“The Freedman” depicts a figure with chains unbound — however the shackles remain dangling from his arm. The version of the sculpture at Williams College Art Museum is from the Carter collection, and has an accompanying key, which suggests the infinite potential of the evolution of liberation and the inevitable dissolving of these ephemeral bounds. Each ancestral generation has walked through a hazy miasma of uncertainty to arrive at this moment in history, where the continuation of emancipation is in focus, an apex just within reach, despite forces that unsuccessfully refuse and seek to stop the momentum forward.