Painting the Enslaved as Liberated -- ep. by Howard Rambsy II

A brief take on Kerry James Marshall’s portraits of John Punch, Scipio Moorhead, and Harriet Tubman, reimagining enslaved figures as liberated subjects through contemporary Black artistic interpretation. 

Written by Howard Rambsy II
Read by Kassandra Timm

Transcript

The first Black person legally enslaved under criminal law in the seventeenth century. An enslaved Black artist from the eighteenth century. A famous fugitive slave from the nineteenth century. All represented as free in the works of a renowned twenty-first-century African American artist.

You’re listening to Remarkable Receptions — a podcast about African American artistic production, the circulation of ideas, and more.

John Punch was an African-born resident of the colony of Virginia working as an indentured servant in the early seventeenth century. In 1640, he ran away along with two European indentured servants. When all three were caught, the two men of European descent received relatively light sentences, while Punch was sentenced to lifelong servitude. He became the first person legally enslaved under criminal law in the English colonies that would later become the United States.

More than a century later in Boston, there was Scipio Moorhead, an enslaved Black artist memorialized in a poem by Phillis Wheatley. In 1773, Moorhead is believed to have produced the drawing on which the famous frontispiece portrait of Wheatley in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was based. That image circulates widely today, yet no other surviving work by Moorhead is known to exist.

Finally, there is Harriet Tubman, the legendary fugitive slave who tirelessly worked to free others. But what might Tubman’s life have looked like after emancipation, beyond the familiar images of escape and resistance?

John Punch, Scipio Moorhead, and Harriet Tubman. The artist Kerry James Marshall chose to produce works of each of them, offering imaginative re-visions of these historical figures.

In 2007, Marshall drew Scipio Moorhead, Portrait of Himself, 1776, which shows Moorhead standing upright and holding drawing tools beside a tall canvas or easel, presenting the enslaved artist as an active maker confidently engaged in the act of artistic creation.

In 2008, Marshall produced Portrait of John Punch (Angry Black Man 1646), an image that shows Punch standing upright in a well-made sweater, looking dignified, his thick locks extending outward as he confronts viewers with an expression that signals defiance.

In 2015, Marshall created Still Life with Wedding Portrait, which depicts Harriet Tubman standing in formal dress with her first husband, John Tubman, standing behind her with his hands resting gently on her shoulders, presenting Tubman within a moment of domestic partnership rarely portrayed in popular representations.

Marshall’s images envision formerly enslaved people living free lives. The paintings testify to what we might call the slavery-creativity paradox, that is, artistic compositions that speak to the horrors of slavery while also showcasing the generative outcomes of Black artists meditating on that history.

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This episode was written by Howard Rambsy, edited by Elizabeth Cali, and read by me, Kassandra Timm.

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