The Curators of ‘Free as They Want to Be’
cheryl finley, Ph.d. & Deborah willis, PH.D.
Baton Rouge Gallery – center for contemporary art (“BRG”), Southern University, and The West Baton Rouge Museum are proud to co-host a special limited-run presentation of the exhibition, Free as they want to be: Artists Committed to Memory. The exhibition was curated by Deborah Willis, Ph.D. and Cheryl Finley, Ph.D.
The curators have also added works from local artists and from local collections specifically for the Baton Rouge adaptation of the exhibition. An additional work from Bisa Butler is also being loaned by The Gordon Parks Foundation for the exhibition.
Photo Credit: Gediyon Kife
Cheryl Finley, Ph.D.
Cheryl Finley, Ph.D., is the Walton Endowed professor in the department of art and visual culture at Spelman College, where she has served as the director of the Atlanta University Center Art History + Curatorial Studies Collective since 2019. She leads an innovative undergraduate program at the world’s largest HBCU consortium in preparing the next generation of African American museum and visual arts professionals. She is a curator, contemporary art critic, and award-winning author. This past May she was recognized with the 2026 David C. Driskell Prize, awarded by Atlanta’s High Museum of Art since 2005, honoring outstanding contributions to the field of African American art. Finley holds a BA from Wellesley College in Spanish and an MA and Ph.D. in African American studies and art history from Yale University.
Photo Credit: Laylah Amatullah Barrayn
DEBORAH WILLIS, Ph.D.
Deborah Willis, Ph.D., is University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She is the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship and is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. She has received awards from the College Art Association for Writing Art History in 2021, the Outstanding Service Award from the Royal Photographic Society in the UK and the 2022 Don Tyson Prize for the Advancement of American Art. She is the author/co-author of several books including KAMALA: Her Historic, Joyful, and Auspicious Sprint to the White House, The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship and Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present, among others. In addition to Free as They Want to Be, Professor Willis’s curated exhibitions include: "Home: Reimagining Interiority" at YoungArts, Miami, "Framing Moments in the Kalamazoo Institute of the Arts," and "Migrations and Meanings in Art." Most recently, Dr. Willis was named the 2023 Mary Lucille Dauray Artist-in-Residence by the Norton Museum of Art.
Reflections in Black, the first comprehensive history of black photographers, is a groundbreaking pictorial collection of African American life. Featuring the work of undisputed masters such as James VanDerZee, Gordon Parks, and Carrie Mae Weems among dozens of others, this book is a refutation of the gross caricature of black life that many mainstream photographers have manifested by continually emphasizing poverty over family, despair over hope. Nearly 600 images offer rich, moving glimpses of everyday black life, from slavery to the Great Migration to contemporary suburban life, including rare antebellum daguerrotypes, photojournalism of the civil rights era, and multimedia portraits of middle-class families. A work so significant that it has the power to reconfigure our conception of American history itself, Reflections in Black demands to be included in every American family's library as an essential part of our heritage. A Los Angeles Times and Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2000, and a Good Morning, America best gift book of 2000.
Curator Talk with deborah willis
Sunday, August 9 (4pm) @Baton Rouge Gallery
Hear from “Free as they want to be” curator Deborah Willis, Ph.D. as she discusses the creation of the exhibition, the research she and fellow curator Cheryl Finley, Ph.D. conducted in advance of the exhibition, and how Black photography fundamentally redefines our understanding of American history. Free and open to all. Details
ABOUT THE PARTNERSHIP
In concert with the exhibition’s originating curators and in partnership across three local organizations situated on historically significant sites, the exhibition is being adapted for a first-of-its-kind, site-specific presentation in southern Louisiana. Led by Baton Rouge Gallery – center for contemporary art (“BRG”), this presentation will simultaneously acknowledge the local relevance of the themes addressed by the originating curators while supplementing them with works from respected artists based in southern Louisiana.
This partnership and the Baton Rouge presentation of Free as They Want to Be is made possible through the generous support of:
Free as they want to be: Artists Committed to Memory originated as a FotoFocus exhibition at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, Cincinnati, Ohio on the occasion of the 2022 FotoFocus Biennial. The traveling exhibition is organized by Curatorial Exhibitions, Pasadena, California.
