PORTLAND, ME.- Moss Galleries presents Abolitionists: Cartography of Resistance and Disobedience, a powerful new exhibition by artist and filmmaker Billy Gérard Frank. On view through May 23, the exhibition brings together a series of mixed-media works and a single-channel film installation that reframe abolition not as a closed chapter of the 19th century, but as an ongoing and unfinished struggle shaping the present.
“Billy Gérard Frank’s work asks us to sit with history not as something resolved, but as something still unfolding,” said gallery owner Elizabeth Moss. “These pieces are visually arresting, but more importantly, they are intellectually and emotionally urgent. They challenge us to consider how the legacies of abolition continue to shape our world today.”
Rendered on wood panels, fabric, and canvas using natural indigo pigments, black ink, and gold, Frank’s works function as layered material palimpsests—surfaces where histories of resistance, erasure, and survival coexist. Carved, stained, and inscribed, each piece reads as a fragment of a broken archive, bearing the physical traces of labor, displacement, and endurance. Figures such as James Baldwin, Nina Simone, and Malcolm X appear alongside earlier abolitionists like Olaudah Equiano and Frederick Douglass, collapsing temporal boundaries and underscoring the continuity of Black resistance across generations. Their presence echoes Baldwin’s assertion that “artists are here to disturb the peace,” positioning Frank’s work within a lineage of artists as witnesses and agitators.
Indigo and gold—materials deeply tied to histories of extraction and exploitation—are reclaimed as central visual and symbolic elements. Indigo, historically bound to plantation economies, becomes both a residue of violence and a site of transformation. Gold, often associated with wealth amassed through enslavement, is reimagined as a marker of Black life, dignity, and spiritual endurance.
Rather than presenting fixed narratives or heroic portraits, the exhibition proposes an “abolitionist cartography”—a visual mapping of freedom as fugitive, relational, and incomplete. Figures, gestures, and texts emerge and dissolve across the surfaces, suggesting the presence of women, maroons, rebels, and thinkers whose contributions have been marginalized or erased.
Complementing the sculptural works is Requiem: Resistance and Disobedience, a 10-minute looping video installation that confronts viewers with archival footage of police violence during the Civil Rights Movement. Drawing from scenes in Birmingham, Selma, and beyond, the film juxtaposes images of state brutality against Black children and demonstrators with close-ups of James Baldwin and Martin Luther King Jr. speaking—isolating voice as breath, body, and resistance. Rendered in stark black-and-white with washes of indigo-blue, the film collapses past and present into a visceral, embodied experience. Its continuous loop denies resolution, mirroring the cyclical nature of racial violence and the urgent need to reimagine abolition as a contemporary project, one that addresses the afterlives of bondage, including carceral systems, surveillance, and systemic inequity.
Billy Gérard Frank (b. Grenada, West Indies) is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and curator whose research-driven practice explores race, memory, exile, global politics, and queer decoloniality. He represented Grenada at the 59th La Biennale di Venezia (2022) and was part of the collective presentation at the 58th Biennale (2019).
Frank’s work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Brooklyn Museum, the Butler Institute of American Art, Yale University, and Frieze London, and is held in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Farnsworth Art Museum, and the Butler Institute of American Art. A recipient of numerous grants, including support from the Ford Foundation’s Just Films initiative, Frank was awarded a 2024 Creative Capital grant for a forthcoming multi-part film project inspired by Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation.
He is the founder and creative director of the Nova Frontier Film Festival & Lab and serves as a Lecturer in Directing and Design at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale.
