CommittedArtiststoMemory
DeborahCherylwantFreeastheytobeFinleyWillis
Support for this catalogue and this 2022 FotoFocus Biennial: World Record exhibition was provided by FotoFocus.
Published to accompany the FotoFocus curated exhi bition ‘Free as they want to be’: Artists Committed to Memory, on view at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center September 30, 2022–March 6, 2023.
Ellen Goeke and Katherine Ryckman Siegwarth Director’sWoodrowForewordKeown, Jr.
Cheryl Finley and Deborah Willis Terry J.RadcliffeAdkinsBaileyP.Ball&A.S.
Thomas
Sadie
CopyrightReproductionAcknowledgementsWilliamWendelCarrieLavaHankYelaineCatherineIsaacDaeshaAdamaNonaOmarBisaSheilaDawoudBarnetteBeyPreeBrightButlerVictorDiopFaustineDelphineFawunduDevónHarrisJulienOpieRodriguezWillisThomasThomasMaeWeemsA.WhiteEarleWilliamsCredits108104604820108122628363854566878849098112116132143143144CONTENTS
Curators’ Statement
PrefaceMary
RADCLIFFEothers.
BAILEY
Radcliffe Bailey (b. 1968, Bridgetown, NJ; lives and works in Atlanta, GA) is a painter, sculptor, installation and mixed media artist who utilizes the layering of imagery, culturally resonant materials and text to explore themes of ancestry, race, migration and col lective memory. He received a BFA from the Atlanta College of Art in 1991 and a decade later began showing with Jack Shainman Gallery in New York. Bailey’s work often incorporates found materials and objects from his past into textured compositions, including traditional African sculpture, tintypes of his family members, ships, train tracks, piano keys and Georgia red clay. The cultural significance and rhythmic prop erties of music are also important influences, as are the history of the Civil War and the Civil Rights move ment in Atlanta and the South. Bailey has exhibited widely, including his critically acclaimed touring exhi bition, Memory as Medicine, in 2011. His works are in the collections of the High Museum of Art, Smithso nian American Art Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago and Denver Art Museum, among
26 Between Two Worlds , 2003, is centered on a studio portrait of a Black woman leaning on a column and dressed in a late-1880s striped, ankle-length dress. The artist references migration and movement in the work’s title and the insertion of a small boat and flag. Bailey invites the viewer to imagine the life of this woman and the roots in her garden. He places an armature at the base of the image, which suggests a fan or a stand—anchoring the figure in a desired place in history.
Deborah
Image 24 x 36 inches, paper 30 x 44 inches Edition of Collection30of Willis
Between Two Worlds, 2003 Color aquatint with color photocopy, chine collé and velvet, Somerset soft white paper
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RADCLIFFE BAILEY
J. P. BALL & A. S. THOMAS
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Daguerreotypist James Presley Ball (1825–1904) was an active abolitionist who used his photographic skills to expose beauty, history, fashion, and activism during a time when parts of the United States were still fighting to end slavery. Ball, a free Black man, was a photographer and an entrepreneur. His interest in photography began around that time. In the fall of 1845, Ball opened a one-room studio in Cincinnati, OH. This early studio venture proved unsuccessful— in three months, he managed to attract only two sitters, one of whom he photographed on credit. Like many daguerreotypists in the early years, Ball worked itinerantly, traveling from city to city. In Cincinnati, Ball was well-known for promoting antislavery activities. Cities like Cincinnati, with easy access to major waterways, were key to the transition from slavery to freedom. In Ohio, the Underground Railroad, a network of safe houses harboring blacks escaping slavery, helped many reestablish their lives along the Great Lakes and in Canada.
Ball’s business prospered in the late 1850s as the city of Cincinnati grew and its residents increased their patronage of the daguerreotype process. He soon opened another gallery, hiring his brotherin-law, Alexander Thomas, as a reception clerk. Thomas had moved to the city from New Orleans in 1852 and married Ball’s sister, Elizabeth. Before the decade ended, Thomas had become extremely popular with clients and soon became Ball’s partner. Together, they opened another gallery under the name of Ball & Thomas. As Ball and Thomas’ patron age escalated, they increased their advertising. Ball and Thomas hired additional operators, and soon they had more business than they could manage. According to business records, they averaged more than $100 a day. With the success of the gallery, the two men became quite affluent. They maintained a partnership for the next twenty years. The studio remained a family enterprise over the years: Thomas Carroll Ball, a brother, worked there as an operator until his death, and Ball Thomas, the son of Alexander Thomas, was a retouch artist. J. P. Ball's reputation drew several renowned sitters to his studio, includ ing Frederick Douglass, and many Union officers and enlisted men during the Civil War. Despite his successes in Cincinnati in the early 1880s, Ball dissolved his partnership with Alexander Thomas, for reasons not known, and moved to Minneapolis, MN, and later to Helena, MT; Seattle, WA; and Honolulu, HI.
Ball’s photographs of the White citizens of Cincinnati reveal that he was a major recipient of White abolitionist patronage. His Great Daguerrean Gallery of the West was one of the largest photography studios in that city. Ball soon gained the interest and support of Black newspapers, including Rochester, NY’s Frederick Douglass’ Paper. A favorable description was published in an article titled “The Colored People of Cincinnati.”
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JAMES PRESLEY BALL
Jesse L. Berch, quartermaster sergeant, 22 Wisconsin Regiment of Racine, Wis. [and]
Albumen print on carte de visite mount
10 x 6 cm
Frank M. Rockwell, postmaster, 22 Wisconsin of Geneva, Wis. / J. P. Ball’s Photographic Gallery, No. 30 West 4th St., betw. Main and Walnut Sts. Cincinnati, O., 1862
J. P. BALL’S PHOTOGRAPHIC GALLERY Frederick Douglass, 1862–1868, Cincinnati, OH. Cincinnati Museum Center, SC #17, Ball and Thomas Photograph Collection, SC#17-059
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BALL & THOMAS PHOTOGRAPHERS
Mattie Allen, n.d., Cincinnati, OH. Cincinnati Museum Center, SC #17, Ball and Thomas Photograph Collection, SC#17-005
A. S. THOMAS Edward Berry, n.d., Cincinnati, OH. Cincinnati Museum Center, SC #17, Ball and Thomas Photograph Collection, SC#17-297
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BALL & THOMAS PHOTOGRAPHERS
Unidentified Boy (possibly James Polk), n.d., Cincinnati, OH. Cincinnati Museum Center, SC #17, Ball and Thomas Photograph Collection, SC#17-022
Cincinnati
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JAMES PRESLEY BALL Alexander S. Thomas, late 1850s–early 1860s Daguerreotype, quarter plate ¼ x 2 ¾ x 3⁄16 inches (8.3 x 7 x 0.5 cm) Art Museum; Gift of James M. Marrs, M.D., 1984.297
3
BALL & THOMAS PHOTOGRAPHIC ART GALLERY Unidentified Man, 1852–1860, Cincinnati, OH. Cincinnati Museum Center, SC #17, Ball and Thomas Photograph Collection, SC#17-062
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SADIE BARNETTE
Born in Oakland, CA in 1984, Sadie Barnette holds a BFA from CalArts and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego. She has been awarded grants and residencies from the Studio Museum in Harlem, Artadia, Art Matters, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Camargo Foundation in France. Barnette has enjoyed solo shows at the ICA Los Angeles; The Lab and the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; MCA San Diego; Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford College, Haverford and the Manetti Shrem Museum, UC Davis. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Pérez Art Museum, Miami, Guggenheim Museum, JP Morgan Chase Art Collection, Blanton Museum, San José Museum of Art, Oakland Museum and Berkeley Art Museum, among others. Barnette lives and works in Oakland.
Sadie Barnette’s multimedia practice illuminates her own family history as it mirrors a collective history of repression and resistance in the United States. The last born of the last born, and hence the youngest of her generation, Barnette holds a long and deep fas cination with the personal and political value of kin. Barnette’s adept materialization of the archive rises above a static reverence for the past; by inserting herself into the retelling, she offers a history that is alive. This installation examines Barnette’s family commitment to political and communal activism. Using archi val material—such as the 500-page dossier compiled by the FBI surveilling her father, Rodney Barnette, during his time in the Black Panther Party—the artist wields the personal nature of generational inheritance to inflect international political struggle with urgency, collapsing temporal distinctions of past and present. This series includes scans of her father’s FBI file when he was a member of the Black Panther Party and re-imagines the experiences and reception from the past and the now.
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SADIE BARNETTE
Untitled (Dad, 1966 and 1968), 2016 Two chromogenic prints 47 x 41 ¼ inches (each)
38 Night Coming Tenderly, Black is a visual reimagining of the movement of bonded people who self-emancipated through the Cleveland and Hudson, OH, land scapes as they approached Lake Erie and the final passage to freedom in Canada. Using both real and imagined sites, these landscape photographs seek to recreate the spatial and sensory experiences of those moving furtively through the darkness. Night Coming Tenderly, Black is a reference to a line from “Dream Variations,” a 1926 poem by Langston Hughes.
DAWOUD BEY
Based in Chicago, IL, Dawoud Bey was born in 1953 in Queens, NY. He holds an MFA from the Yale University School of Art and is currently Professor of Art and former Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago. In 2017, Bey was awarded the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” grant. He is also the recipient of fellowships from United States Artists, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, among other honors. Bey’s work is featured in numerous publications and is the subject of several monographs and publications, including Class Pictures (Aperture, 2007), Harlem, USA (Yale University Press, 2012), and Dawoud Bey: The Birmingham Project (Birmingham Museum of Art, 2013). His work has been included in important solo and group exhibitions internationally and in the permanent collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Brooklyn Museum, High Museum of Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, Museum of Modern Art, NY, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem, Tate Modern, Whitney Museum of American Art, and other muse ums around the world.
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Untitled #5 (Tree Trunk, Picket Fence, and House), 2017
DAWOUD BEY
Gelatin silver photograph x 24 inches
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DAWOUD BEY Untitled #7 (Branches and Woods), 2017 Gelatin silver photograph 20 x 24 inches
DAWOUD BEY
Gelatin silver photograph x 24
20
inches
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Untitled #10 (Whedon-Hinsdale House Through Branches), 2017
