NEW YORK.- New York City’s first museum, the New-York Historical Society (N-YHS) presents Legacies: Contemporary Artists Reflect on Slavery, bringing together the works of distinguished artists, including Faith Ringgold, Carrie Mae Weems, Fred Wilson, Whitfield Lovell, Mel Edwards, Lorenzo Pace, Betye Saar, Marc Latamie, Willie Birch, Ellen Driscoll, Eli Kince and a host of other critically acclaimed contemporary artists in a reflection on how America’s history of racially based slavery has shaped our society. The exhibition, which will include 41 works by 32 distinguished artists, will be on view June 16, 2006, though January 7, 2007.

“The idea of presenting this exhibition at the New-York Historical Society was inspired by the Society's two groundbreaking exhibitions--Slavery in New York (October 5, 2005 through March 26, 2006) and New York Divided: Slavery and the Civil War (November 17, 2006 - April 29, 2007)--which explore the history of slavery in New York, from Dutch colonization through the end of the Civil War,” says N-YHS president and CEO Dr. Louise Mirrer. “Our mission is to engage everyone in thinking about, and reflecting on history. Legacies shows how important history is to our lives today, and provokes us to consider why a topic relating to the past continues to occupy a central place in the works of living artists.”

Legacies will be on view for an extended period of six months, illustrating that art can give expressive form to history, bridging past and present with explorations of emotions and experience. Motivated by the dehumanizing story of slavery, some artists have been posing provocative questions about how history affects our world today, unleashing critical commentary on the black experience. In some cases, historical objects from the Society’s collections will be juxtaposed with related modern artworks. The result will provide the visitor with an opportunity and an occasion to experience history as conveyed in innovative art forms while meditating on the impact of history on contemporary art.

Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims, president of the Studio Museum of Harlem, led the curatorial team at the Society—Cynthia R. Copeland, American Revolution Project Director and Kathleen Hulser, Public Historian—in the work of conceptualizing and organizing this ambitious exhibition by artists working in the United States and abroad. “This remarkable series of exhibitions offers an unusually rich cross-fertilization of history and art, demonstrating that the past does indeed influence the way in which we see the world today,” said Sims.

The exhibition brings together more than two dozen artists working in a broad array of media including painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, moving images, fiber arts, video, oral histories, and public sculpture in a remarkable ensemble of often-challenging works of art that will generate both historical reflection and public debate.

Some of the artists borrow actual documents from history and install them in startling new contexts. For example, Malcolm Bailey remakes a famous 19th century graphic of a slave ship packed tightly with bodies into a work titled Hold, Separate but Equal. The crouching human cargo is equally divided between white and black figures. Cedric Smith has created a new series called Slave Ads, which explore the unspoken power struggles between "masters" and the enslaved through old runaway slave advertisements. Other artists invoke formal conventions of the 19th century, but imbue them with new, provocative meanings. For instance, Kara Walker echoes the popular language of 1840s silhouettes in her narrative sequence The Emancipation Approximation. But in Walker's renditions, the outlined figures engage in tabooed acts and sexual fantasies that would have been totally foreign to the original Victorian parlor art of the cut silhouette. Algernon Miller's designs for the new Frederick Douglass Memorial Circle at the corner of Central Park and Eighth Avenue quote Underground Railroad quilt patterns, but etch them in granite and stone, rather than cloth. In each of these cases the artistic imagination revises the documentary and symbolic records to offer audiences a window into the past that is both aesthetic and historical.

Legacies includes the work of four MacArthur “genius” award winners--Kara Walker, Kerry James Marshall, Carrie Mae Weems and Fred Wilson. Six new works were created for this exhibition, including: Celestial Praise House for Seneca Village, by the artistic team of Leslie King-Hammond and José J. Mapily, who explore and reflect on the significance of sacred spaces through the medium of altars and creative meditative installations to understand their intimate, personal, and communal power; Joseph Lewis III’s Mandela and Anne Frank Forever: The Endless Column, in which the artist poses questions about universal human experiences and communications media that both connect and divide people; Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry’s Mammy/Daddy, which addresses the concept of “twinning” and incorporates video, drawing and dolls such as a ca. 1855–80 topsy-turvy doll from the collection of the New-York Historical Society Museum; Fred Wilson’s installation project Untitled, which draws upon the Society’s collections to create an exhibition-within-the-exhibition that suggests how messages about persistent ideologies of race and class are conveyed by objects and by institutions.

While providing a contemporary perspective on slavery, the exhibition also reminds us that slavery still affects millions of people of all races around the world today. One of the six installations in the exhibition is the American Anti-Slavery Group’s New Captivity Narratives, juxtaposing video testimony from modern day survivors of slavery with the voices of their nineteenth-century counterparts, as found in the New-York Historical Society collections. The American Anti-Slavery Group offers a provocative reflection on slavery, now and then. The story of Simon Deng, a member of the American Anti-Slavery Group, is particularly powerful. Deng was born in Sudan and captured into slavery in his childhood. He tells of the modern persistence of the “peculiar institution” that resonates with the classic slave narratives of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and others. As Henry Louis Gates has written, “The Afro-American slave narratives form one of the largest bodies of literature produced by any group of slaves in history.” The comparison of these real experiences of our time with the written record of the American past embodies relational aesthetics that engage the community, in the context of art, with real-life events.