More than three decades ago, Cheryl Finley opened an auction catalog and found a small album of 19th-century photographs for sale.
The album contained tintype portraits of African Americans dated to around the 1870s. Finley, then working as an appraiser specializing in photography, could not know the histories of the people pictured in its pages. But given when they had lived, she thought they were likely descendants of enslaved people or perhaps had themselves experienced enslavement.
Something about seeing their photographs offered for sale troubled her.
“How ironic it might be for something like that to be on an auction block again,” Finley recalls.
So she bought it.
Finley describes the purchase as an act of “saving and reclamation.” The album remained with her as she became an art historian, professor, author and curator whose scholarship has focused on Black art, photography, memory and the ways history is preserved.
Now, the album has become part of a larger conversation.
It is among the historical objects and contemporary works brought together in “Free as they want to be: Artists Committed to Memory,” an exhibition at the Hunter Museum of American Art through Jan. 11.
Curated by Finley and Deborah Willis, the exhibition features more than 20 artists examining freedom through historical artifacts, lived experience and collective memory. Photography anchors much of the exhibition, but visitors will also encounter video, projection, textiles and other media.
Among the artists represented are Carrie Mae Weems, Terry Adkins, Bisa Butler and Wendel White.
For Finley, the exhibition is about putting history to work.
“I hope people leave thinking about how visual artists and others, including themselves, their parents and their children, engage in acts of understanding, hope and seeing around liberty, justice and freedom,” Finley says.
Looking backward to look forward
The exhibition originated after Finley and Willis were invited to develop a show for the 2022 FotoFocus Biennial in Cincinnati.
Its original setting proved important.
The exhibition was staged at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, situated along the Ohio River across from Kentucky. Finley and Willis were already scholars whose work frequently dealt with memory and memorialization, and the location helped direct their thinking toward freedom and the ways Black Americans have historically imagined it.
They also turned to writer James Baldwin.
“Free as they want to be” is drawn from Baldwin’s observation that freedom is not something bestowed upon people but something people take for themselves.
Finley says Baldwin’s thinking about freedom helped provide the framework, but she and Willis also considered artists whose work reaches into the past, whether through historical figures such as abolitionist Frederick Douglass, or through archival materials.
The archive, Finley says, can both preserve history and help people look ahead.
“It can enable us to imagine future freedoms and future possibility.”
One of the clearest examples comes from White.
White has visited archives around the country researching African American history and struggles for freedom. One of his works in the exhibition arranges photographs of archival objects in a large grid, allowing discrete remnants of history to accumulate into something larger.
For Finley, the arrangement demonstrates something fundamental about curating itself.
“Curatorial practice is about care, but it’s also about storytelling,” she says.
The objects White has photographed include historical texts, tintypes and other artifacts carrying traces of Black history. Among them is material connected to Douglass.
That repetition is deliberate, Finley says.
Douglass appears or is referenced in work by artists separated by generations and working in different media. Historical photographs of him appear alongside contemporary works that revisit his image and his legacy as an abolitionist and symbol of Black freedom.
Textile artist Bisa Butler, for example, draws upon historical photography and portraiture in creating her quilts. Her work “The Storm” depicts Douglass, connecting a contemporary artistic practice to one of the most photographed figures of the 19th century.
“We wanted to make that connection historically, but also bring it to the present day,” Finley says.
Learning to see
Finley’s interest in the ways art carries history began long before she became a curator.
She grew up outside Washington, D.C., in a home filled with art. Her parents, who met at Howard University, never pursued art professionally but loved and collected it, making museum visits a regular part of family life.
That early exposure followed Finley to Wellesley College, where she studied Spanish but took a work-study job in the art department. There, she encountered what she described as the “Wellesley Method,” an approach to art history concerned with teaching people “ways of seeing,” she says.
By graduation, Finley was gravitating toward the arts.
Her early professional work included managing the archive of photographer Berenice Abbott, whose photographs documented figures in the intellectual and artistic world as well as a changing New York City. Finley’s responsibilities included caring for Abbott’s photographs, negatives, writings and other archival materials and organizing exhibitions.
Her career eventually expanded into writing, consulting and art appraisal, particularly in photography. But Finley also became conscious of what she was not seeing.
“As a Black woman, I wasn’t seeing the work of Black artists, even in photography, championed in the way I wanted it to be,” she says.
She decided she needed to better understand that history herself if she wanted to help others understand and appreciate it.
Finley earned a doctorate in art history and African American studies from Yale University and went on to teach at Wellesley and Cornell University. She now serves as the Walton Endowed Professor of Art History and Curatorial Studies at Spelman College, where she directs a program preparing students across the Atlanta University Center for careers as curators, scholars, teachers and other arts professionals.
That concern with who enters the historical record – and who does not – also connects Finley closely with Willis.
A long conversation
Finley and Willis have known each other for decades.
Shortly after college, while Finley was working with the Abbott archive, she regularly traveled into New York to visit museums and galleries. During one visit to the Studio Museum in Harlem, she heard Willis give a talk.
Finley sat in the front row, introduced herself afterward and began a friendship and intellectual partnership that has continued ever since.
“She’s my sister,” Finley says.
Willis’ scholarship addressed an absence similar to the one Finley would later recognize in her own work. Studying the history of photography, Willis found histories of women photographers and other aspects of the medium, but Black photographers frequently went unnamed or unrecognized.
She began researching them.
Finley describes herself and Willis as scholars who entered fields in which some of the books they needed had not yet been written. Willis helped write them, including a history of Black photographers spanning a century beginning near the birth of photography itself.
The two women have since collaborated on books, exhibitions, conferences and other projects centered on Black art and culture.
Willis also brings an unusual perspective to “Free as they want to be” as both a scholar and an artist whose own work appears in the exhibition.
“She understands curatorial practice from both the curator’s and the artist’s perspective, and I think that helps make any exhibition more well-rounded,” Finley says.
Together, Finley says, they knew many of the artists whose work was grappling with the questions they wanted the exhibition to explore.
“We know the people who are doing this work, who are on the cutting edge,” she says, “and we wanted to be able to put them in conversation with one another.”
An exhibition that changes
Those conversations have continued to evolve as the exhibition has traveled.
Finley describes “Free as they want to be” as a show that “shape shifts.”
Some of that is practical, as each museum has different architecture and gallery space, while photographs and other works on paper are sensitive to light and cannot always remain on display indefinitely. In other cases, lenders simply need works returned.
But the changes can also add something.
At a previous stop in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, institutions supplemented traveling works with pieces from their own archives and work by local contemporary artists. That gave the exhibition, Finley says, an immediacy and locality specific to the place where people were encountering it.
What remains constant from one iteration to the next, including in Chattanooga, is the conversation across time.
Finley sees the exhibition as multigenerational: established artists alongside younger artists, contemporary work alongside archival material, historical figures appearing and reappearing as subsequent generations reconsider them.
For Finley, those conversations across generations matter because historical images and figures remain relevant to the way people understand the present and imagine the future.
“These historical images and historical figures need to remain resonant and present in order for us to understand our future,” Finley says.
That includes figures such as Douglass, whose struggle for freedom connects the historical and contemporary artists represented in the exhibition.
“It’s about understanding,” Finley says. “It’s about liberty, justice and freedom.”