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Freedomways: From Jubilee to Juneteenth
ON VIEW NOW THROUGH MARCH 25, 2025
Hank Willis Thomas. Remember Me.
2009, Photograph, 2010.5.7 A
“In Connecticut, the journey to freedom [begins during the] pre-revolutionary war [and continues through the] 1960’s with legislation that began to suggest the resolution to rights and privileges that were being denied for about 100 years after the end of slavery...
Do Black Americans have the freedoms promised in these eras?”
-Frank Mitchell, Ph.D., Curator-at-Large
Drawing from The Amistad Center’s permanent collection, Freedomways examines contemporary art and archival material to explore the trajectory of Black freedom celebrations from Jubilee commemorations honoring Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln to Juneteenth, a federal holiday which marks the complete abolishment of slavery.
Featuring art by Hank Willis Thomas, Ed Dwight, Charly Palmer, Richard Yarde, Margaret Burroughs, and more, this exhibition investigates various aspects of freedom related to the African American experience. As gradual emancipation legislation liberated more African Americans in the Northeastern United States, great festivities accompanied pivotal milestones in American history, such as the Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil War, and the Juneteenth decree. Decades of freedom-fighting punctuated by victory celebrations produced a social justice-oriented culture of jubilee that transformed American popular culture through faith, labor, and leisure.
Conceptually, the exhibition is inspired by abolitionist Frederick Douglass’reflections about the notion of freedom where he posed the question:“What, to the American slave, is your fourth of July?”
The title, Freedomways, originates from a journal managed by Shirley Graham Dubois, the playwright, activist and wife of WEB DuBois.
Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass - cabinet card by Mathew B. Brady (MET, 2005.100.754)
Shirley Graham Du Bois and W. E. B. Du Bois on his 87th birthday, 1955
Photo by Lotte Jacobi, Courtesy University of Massachusetts Amherst (mums312-i0524)
Freedomways invites viewers to think about the long trajectory to freedom.
With the support of the Department of Economic and Community Development, Office of the Arts, which also receives funds from the federal ARPA.
“In Connecticut, the journey to freedom [begins during the] pre-revolutionary war [and continues through the] 1960’s with legislation that began to suggest the resolution to rights and privileges that were being denied for about 100 years after the end of slavery...
Do Black Americans have the freedoms promised in these eras?”
-Frank Mitchell, Ph.D., Curator-at-Large
Drawing from The Amistad Center’s permanent collection, Freedomways examines contemporary art and archival material to explore the trajectory of Black freedom celebrations from Jubilee commemorations honoring Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln to Juneteenth, a federal holiday which marks the complete abolishment of slavery.
Featuring art by Hank Willis Thomas, Ed Dwight, Charly Palmer, Richard Yarde, Margaret Burroughs, and more, this exhibition investigates various aspects of freedom related to the African American experience. As gradual emancipation legislation liberated more African Americans in the Northeastern United States, great festivities accompanied pivotal milestones in American history, such as the Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil War, and the Juneteenth decree. Decades of freedom-fighting punctuated by victory celebrations produced a social justice-oriented culture of jubilee that transformed American popular culture through faith, labor, and leisure.
Conceptually, the exhibition is inspired by abolitionist Frederick Douglass’reflections about the notion of freedom where he posed the question:“What, to the American slave, is your fourth of July?”
The title, Freedomways, originates from a journal managed by Shirley Graham Dubois, the playwright, activist and wife of WEB DuBois.
Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass - cabinet card by Mathew B. Brady (MET, 2005.100.754)
Shirley Graham Du Bois and W. E. B. Du Bois on his 87th birthday, 1955
Photo by Lotte Jacobi, Courtesy University of Massachusetts Amherst (mums312-i0524)
Freedomways invites viewers to think about the long trajectory to freedom.
A commemorative print of Abraham Lincoln and the text of the Emancipation Proclamation (ALPLM)
Emancipation
Thomas Nast.- Emancipation, 1865, Bibliothèque numérique mondiale, public domain.
With the support of the Department of Economic and Community Development, Office of the Arts, which also receives funds from the federal ARPA.
Frank Mitchell, Ph.D,Curator-at-Large
Frank Mitchell is a cultural organizer in visual arts and public humanities. He is The Amistad Center for Art & Culture’s Curator at Large and Curatorial Adviser for the Toni N. and Wendell C. Harp Historical Museum at New Haven’s Dixwell Q House. He is a consultant to SmokeSygnals, the region’s largest Indigenous-led exhibition design firm, on the forthcoming Mystic Seaport Museum exhibition Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea.
Frank’s curatorial projects include the exhibitions Timeless: Telling Our Neighborhood Stories—Chapter 1: Constance Baker Motley, Finding Freeman(s), The Nutmeg Pulpit: Hartford’s Talcott Street Church & Black Community Formation—and with The Amistad Center—Afrocosmologies: American Reflections, 40 Acres: The Promise of a Black Pastoral, Hairitage, and Soulfood: African American Cooking and Creativity. Publications include the catalog Afrocosmologies: American Reflections, the anthology African American Connecticut Explored, and the culinary study African American Food Culture. He has taught at the University of Connecticut, Trinity College, the University of the Arts, and Franklin & Marshall College.
Frank began work in museums as a programmer for The Anacostia Museum and The Studio Museum in Harlem. A graduate of The University of Michigan’s PhD program in American Culture, he has a Master of Arts degree in African-American Studies from Yale University, and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Bowdoin College. Mitchell serves as vice chair of the CTHumanities board, treasurer of the New England Foundation for the Arts board, and a member of the Elm Shakespeare Company and the Eli Whitney Museum boards.