CHARLESTON, SC.- William Turner Gallery announced the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina has acquired two pieces from Mark Steven Greenfield's Halo series, which debuted at William Turner Gallery in 2022.
Halo presents an amazing cast of historical black figures, most of whom were legendary and mythic characters in their time, but have been nearly lost to the vagaries and biases of history as seen through a white lens. With Halo, Greenfield brings the stories of Black folk-saints, martyrs, freedom-fighters, survivors, magicians, and visionaries back into view. Many of the figures are from the 1400-1800s, a timeframe that corresponds with Europeans beginning to use racial distinction as a tool to justify slavery. Greenfield honors their simultaneously disturbing and astounding lives by bestowing them with halos, traditionally seen as reverential symbols of adoration and respect.
The two paintings acquired by the International African American Museum are Maria Filipa De Oliveira, 2024 and Dessalines, 2022. Both pieces are featured in the ongoing IAAM exhibition “Re/Defined: Creative Expressions of Blackness From The Diaspora”.
Maria Filipa De Oliveira: This painting features Maria Filipa De Oliveira, a Brazilian freedom fighter from Itaparica, a small island off Salvador, Bahia, historically a disembarkation point for enslaved people from Angola and Congo. Maria was a free woman believed to be the daughter of an enslaved family in Sudan. In 1823, she led a group of 200 people, mostly women, in a resistance battle against the Portuguese. Maria and a group of women seduced the watchmen for the ships anchored off Itaparica, then beat them with branches from a poisonous plant before setting fire to 42 vessels bound to invade Salvador.
Dessalines: This painting features Jean-Jacques Dessalines, a key leader in the Haitian Revolution and Haiti’s first ruler after independence in 1804. Born into slavery, Dessalines rose through the ranks as a lieutenant under Toussaint Louverture before becoming a central figure in expelling the French from the island. In 1804, he declared Haiti a free nation and became the first Black head of state in the Americas. Despite his increasingly autocratic rule and the violent Haitian Massacre of 1804 that aimed to purge the island of the French, Dessalines is remembered as the founding father of Haiti and one of the leaders of the most successful slave rebellion in history.
