Maya Freelon Seeks Images of Black Childhood at the Library

Earlier this year, Maya Freelon, an award-winning visual artist, visited the Library of Congress to conduct research in the Library’s collections. Her work, which has been presented in a variety of venues, including The Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists and the Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower, uses tissue paper as a powerful medium to visualize the transience and vulnerability of emotions. Freelon is based in Durham, North Carolina. 

She is also one of the Connecting Communities Digital Initiative’s 2024 Artists/Scholars-in-Residence. Her current project, Whippersnappers: Recapturing, Reviewing, and Reimagining the Lives of Enslaved Children in the United States, uses materials from the Library’s digital collections and mixed-media to create new artwork that honors and celebrates the innocence, beauty, and resilience of Black children. The title of her work holds special meaning—when people see the title of her work, she wants them to remember the history of the United States and the legacy of these children. 

Freelon shared her more about her work at CCDI’s Summer Fuse event last month. 

Visiting the Library 

Freelon’s research trip included visits to the Library’s Newspaper and Current Periodical Reading Room and Prints and Photographs Reading Room in an effort to identify images of joy in images of enslaved children. When asked why focus on children, Freelon said, “I was thinking about that age when you’re innocent and you’re still forming who you are between zero and five. I wanted to think about what they were thinking about and what they were doing day to day, despite the atrocities happening around them.”  

The photographs she finds of these individuals will form the basis for her mixed media pieces. 

Finding Their Faces  

In the Prints and Photographs Reading Room, Maya explored stereographs and other rare materials that can only be viewed and handled under the care of a librarian. Reference librarians, Katherine Blood, Ryan Brubacher, and Michelle Smiley helped her navigate the Library’s collections and shared resources to help identify photos for her project. Freelon initially found difficulty in identifying images that evoked joy, so she had to expand the dates and criteria for the photographs she was seeking. 

Smiley guided Freelon to the Library’s Liljenquist, Gladstone, Lewis Hine, and Frances Benjamin Johnston collections. Maya uncovered many photos, primarily from the 19th and 20th centuries, that featured Black children playing, working, and simply living. She also found photos in the Farm Security Administration collection, which contains photographs depicting American life between 1935 and 1944. The collection included several photos from the 1930s and 1940s of Black children and babies. 

Seeking images of enslaved African American children is emotionally taxing work, especially for someone of African descent. Freelon knew that some of the collection materials would be triggering or racist, but viewing images of enslaved African American children was especially challenging. “It took longer to go through the images and archives, as I sat with the overwhelming truth that these children were considered property. I wanted to honor each image I saw,” she said. 

While Maya explored the images, she contended with the fact that the images she found were small. To complete her pieces, she intentionally blew up the images to larger than life-size to emphasize the sense of personhood for each of these children.  

Unexpected Connections in the Library 

One fascinating observation Maya noted was how similar some of the individuals in the photos looked to her relatives and friends. She even found an image of a young boy who looked very similar to her nephew, Justice. 

During her visit to the Newspapers and Current Periodical Reading Room, she encountered a familiar name. The book, Studies from life; adapted from drawings by Adolphe La Lyre, included a forward written by her great-grandfather, Allan R. Freelon Sr. (1895-1960), who was a painter, printmaker, photographer, and teacher in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His papers are located in the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.  

Having an interest in archival photographs of Black people at a young age, Maya’s work appears to come full circle, as her father and Freelon Sr. were both photographers. She began working with photographs more than 15 years ago.  

Katherine Blood also shared with Maya that her own work, Look Down on War, is also in the Library’s collections and was even recently used in a course entitled Art and Peace Culture Transformation at George Mason University’s Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution. 

Freelon described diving into the Library’s archives as a journey with surprising discoveries waiting to be found. “Working with the Library’s staff was a transformational experience that shifted my project from its original idea,” she said. 

Learn More about Maya’s Work! 

To learn more about Maya Freelon’s work and the work of other CCDI award recipients, subscribe to the Of the People: Widening the Path blog. 

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CCDI is part of the Library’s Of the People: Widening the Path program with support from the Mellon Foundation. This four-year program provides financial and technical support to individuals, institutions and organizations to create imaginative projects using the Library’s digital collections and centering one or more of the following groups: Black, Indigenous, Hispanic/Latinx, Asian American and Pacific Islander, and other communities of color from any of the 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, and its territories and commonwealths (Puerto Rico, Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, American Samoa, U.S. Virgin Islands). Learn more about CCDI here.