The Amon Carter Museum of American Art is diving into the rift between promises made and kept. For Emancipation: The Unfinished Project of Liberation, museum staff chose seven contemporary Black artists to produce work to display alongside a handful of Civil War-era pieces.
The result is thought-provoking and often unsettling, forcing us to question our assumptions about the state of race relations in the United States nearly 160 years after the Civil War.
Toward the end of the show is a striking sculpture by Alfred Conteh. In “Float,” a buoyant female figure covered in rust and decay appears to be floating upward even as rusty chains bind her feet to the ground. Her wide-brimmed hat suggests she has left a church service or another festive or solemn occasion, but there is little else to indicate where or when she is from, which lends a sense of purgatory to the work.
Emancipation: The Unfinished Project of Liberation is brilliantly successful in reviving uncomfortable parts of this country’s history — not simply as an artistic compass showing where we’ve been but rather as a subtle and thoughtful reminder that America is arguably no closer to delivering on its promise of Black liberation than it was in 1863.
