Fighting for Freedom: Black Craftspeople and the Pursuit of Independence

Visitors can explore the creations, contributions and legacies of African Americans who fought for freedom during the American Revolution and beyond.

The Revolutionary War serves as a testament to the forging of the United States of America and the embodiment of ideas and principles pertaining to liberation and sovereignty. While often overshadowed, African Americans played a central role in attaining such values as realities in America. Their participation during the Revolutionary War serves as a perfect vignette to observe the long journey towards a unified and independent nation. The purpose of this exhibition is to highlight the creations, contributions, and legacies of African Americans as they fought for freedom during the midst of the American Revolution and beyond. At times the war was unified and inseparable. In contrast, other vignettes display people struggling to break free from oppression while their oppressors also wrestled with ideas of liberty.

While covering the Revolutionary period, Fighting for Freedom spans beyond those war years of the Revolution, as African Americans sought explicit realities of liberty through craft well into the 19th and early 20th centuries with the underpinning idea of African American craft as a catalyst for freedom-seeking which displays itself in a host of ways. This exhibition intends to encompass African American crafts of furniture, metals (silver), paintings, textiles, tools, and the assortment of other objects connected to African American craft.