Afrolantica: Virginia’s Fugitive Legacies illustrates the stories of fugitive slaves in antebellum and Jim Crow Virginia through haunting imaginations and histiographic interpretation. The works in this series are acrylic paintings that draw upon the necessary speculation to supplement the missing citations of maroon life, fugitivity, and antiblack terror.
The figurative depictions of fugitive slaves are symbolized through monochromatic color schemes of blues, purples, and pinks that represent the depths of the Black Atlantic and the other-worldly nature of Blackness in the mythology of the white imagination. Only whiteness is represented with flesh tones because flesh has been represented historically and traditionally to be pale, human, and free. Blackness is enmeshed with colors presumed outside of the scope of humanity and always will remain in deep contrast to the shallow undertones of white skin.
Many of the pieces within the series illustrate illicit and explicit formations of insurgency in which slaves engaged in direct forms of violence against white people or themselves. This is intentional as it is a necessary disruption to the normalization of antiblack violence or the overestimation of afrofuturistic optimism. Murder, suicide, self-harm, abortion, infanticide, and assault were all formats of resilience, revenge, freedom-making, and psychological trauma responses to enslavement.
The inspiration for this exhibition comes deeply from Black artists who have transformed cultural discourse through scholarship, visual art, and storytelling. Derrick Bell’s legacy as one of the founding scholars of Critical Race Theory and as a creative writer transformed the political analysis for this exhibit. Bell’s ‘Afrolantica Legacies’ is where the title comes from and is referred to through the unearthing of how complex fugitivity can be for Black people when there is nowhere to run. Toni Morrison, Lucille Clifton, Saidya Hartman, and bell hooks have also deeply inspired this exhibition as their work has brought about a particular political framework of death and resistance as a means to understand the (un)ethics of what it means to live in an antiblack world.
Overall, the Afrolantica series invites viewers to engage in the complex, intimate, violent, and ethical-unethical of what it means to be Black and seek freedom within a world where we are always and forever slaves.
