Maya Freelon’s Kaleidoscopic Artwork Reclaims the Freedom of Enslaved Children at Historic Stagville, North Carolina

“Whenever things happen in threes, I perk up and pay attention,” says Maya Freelon, a Durham-born visual artist. “The first is a knock, the second a slap, and the third a shake.” In the spring of 2024, when three different people forwarded her an application to the Library of Congress’s Connecting Communities Digital Initiative residency, she heeded the call. 

In her application, Freelon, a descendant of sharecroppers, proposed combing through the photos of enslaved children to look for joy. “When we teach the history of slavery in schools…it’s factual and not human,” she says. In capturing small moments of joy within such a terrible institution, she sought to shift that balance. The result, Whippersnappers: Recapturing, Reviewing, and Reimagining the Lives of Enslaved Children in the United States, is a seven-part installation throughout the home of a former master at what is now Stagville State Historic Site in North Carolina—one of the state’s largest plantations, where more than nine hundred people were enslaved. The exhibition runs until January 25, 2025.

For the project, Freelon recalled her childhood field trips to Stagville. “I thought about how powerful it would be to present these children I found in the Library [of Congress] archives—even if they weren’t connected to the Stagville site specifically, they existed in a space that was similar,” she says. But Stagville’s Bennehan House, where the plantation owner resided, had its own extensive records to comb through. A historic ledger on the property accounted for over two hundred enslaved children born—and often separated from the mothers—in what was called the recordkeeping room. It registered the mothers’ first names and the month the child was born for property documentation; when they died, the date was scribbled in the margins. “First stepping foot in there again, I thought what a tremendous task it was, and how do I shed a light on something that has been dimmed and ignored?”

Meanwhile, at the Library of Congress in D.C., Freelon scanned the extensive archives of W.E.B. Du Bois’s catalogue African American Photographs Assembled for 1900 Paris Exposition and Lomax Collection, which focus on Black and Southern subjects. To the mixed-media artist, transitioning art forms from her studio to the library and vice-versa came naturally. But the process of finding images of smiling or laughing children proved more difficult than Freelon anticipated. “It was a lot of weight to produce something beautiful, entertaining, and informative and still honor these children who were left by the wayside,” she says. Many of the subjects in the photographs were captured for ownership documentation, or the images were warped into racist caricatures. Freelon expanded her parameters to give herself more material to work with, deciding to include “indifference and candid shots.”

When the artist stumbled on a small portrait of a little girl, she kept coming back to her face. In a field dotted with wildflowers, the girl holds a bundle of blooms in a tiny hand against her white dress. “A lot of the photos were posed or had children sitting,” Freelon says. “Whoever took the photo made her laugh from behind the camera. I don’t know much about her or her name, but I named her Beautiful Flower.”

Photo: maya freelon

Beautiful Flower, 2024. Tissue ink monoprint and archival print. 40” x 60”.

At a massive sixty inches tall and forty inches wide, Beautiful Flower now hangs on the wall of the plantation house. By stretching out the portraits far beyond their original size, Freelon achieves an overdue appreciation for the enslaved children she came across during her studies. “I wanted to take these tiny images and blow them up to life-size,” she says. “I wanted to uplift Black children and bring honor, respect and beauty. We all experience childhood, and we can all agree it’s sacred.” 

Whippersnappers is the first show to kick off Art on the Land, a new initiative from North Carolina Historic Sites that brings in creatives to reactivate historic places throughout the state with artistic collaborations and site-specific work. The initiative is led and curated by Michelle Lanier, director of North Carolina Historic Sites, and Johnica Rivers, curator-at-large. “Historic Stagville is both a site of memory and a place of possibility,” says Rivers. “Whippersnappers brings these images out of the silence of the archive into a contemporary moment where the viewer can imagine more just futures.”

Beautiful Flower is one of more than ten images featured in Whippersnappers, which she combined with dozens of early-twentieth-century photos obtained from her partner’s family—all transformed in both scale and form. Freelon experimented with scanning the images to a higher resolution and running her signature delicate, bleeding tissue paper through an industrial Epson printer, which allowed her to brush water on the surface of the images to create washes of pigment that blended and bloomed while preserving the printed ink. “When you mix the colors, you can play with it, crunch it, give it dimension, and turn it into something more interesting. I love black and white photos that have high-contrast areas—white prints as the color of the paper. The black and dark areas come out saturated and steadfast, and I can make worlds in those light areas.” In the case of Beautiful Flower, prismatic hues bubble and stream in the space around the little girl’s head, washing her white dress in color and light.

Photo: Lissa Gotwals

Within the installation, layers of tissue paper around the rooms add dimension to the printed monotypes.

In addition to installing large technicolor monoprints onto the wall, Freelon took a week to fully transform seven rooms at Stagville by installing dream-like scenes. Draped in a rainbow of tissue paper, sculptures of women and children are joined by winding cords; laundry lines of color-drenched archival family photos and hand-drawn illustrations hang like quilts from the walls; cocoons of layered paper evoke butterfly chrysalises from the wall and ceilings. In an attic space titled Safe Spaces, which honors the abolitionist writer Harriet Jacobs, who escaped slavery, viewers can peek into a tiny room and see the form of a little girl crouched by a window. 

As much as the show is about childhood, it shows a deep reverence for motherhood, too. “ I don’t think I could have made this work as poignant before becoming a mom,” says Freelon, a mother of three. Multiple rooms shelter moments between figures of mothers and children, including the recordkeeping room where babies were once pried from women’s arms. “These mothers existed and persisted and survived,” she says. “It made me feel that more careful about how I was going to present this, [with] a ton of sadness and pain and trauma attached to it.” 

But just as she set out to do in her initial proposition, Freelon knew she had to find a balance; groups of children were going to come through the exhibition, and her project ultimately sought to restore joy where it had been robbed. So she added colorful tape on the floor to create hopscotch patterns for visitors, and she joined the hands of children and mothers figures. In the recordkeeping room where children were once viewed as belongings, Freelon blanketed papers covered in names around the figure of a child at play. “Children are resilient, and they can go from one drastic situation to laughing the next moment—it’s a survival tactic,” Freelon says. “They have so much more living to do.”