Free Family Day @ Telfair Museums’ Jepson Center, Savannah
A large fabric canopy draped overhead and spanning an entire museum gallery greets visitors to Sonya Clark: Finding Freedom, which opened Oct. 1 at the Jepson Center.
From 10AM-to 5PM on Sat. Oct. 16 2021, Savannah and Chatham County residents can view the exhibition free as part of Telfair Museums’ Free Family Day at the Jepson Center. They can also see Heavy is the Crown, a newly opened exhibition by the artist Noel W Anderson.
Telfair’s presentation of the immersive installation by Clark, an artist and Amherst College professor, offers a celestial viewpoint that encourages viewers to consider freedom-seeking enslaved individuals whose forced labor built America’s wealth. Draped as if a night sky overhead, the large-scale canopy is pieced together from cyanotype reactive fabric squares made with the help of workshop participants over the course of Clark’s various residencies.
Often under cover of night with bounty hunters at their heels, enslaved individuals seeking freedom used the constellations like the Big Dipper to orient their way north along the Underground Railroad—a network of people, safe houses, and clandestine routes in the early to mid-19th century used to escape from states, such as Georgia, that sanctioned slavery, into Northern states and Canada.
On Sept. 30, Clark delivered Telfair’s free, annual Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Lecture to a full crowd at the Jepson Center, with funding provided by the Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, the City of Savannah, and the Georgia Council for the Arts.
Sonya Clark: Finding Freedom is organized by the Phillips Museum of Art at Franklin and Marshall College in collaboration with Telfair Museums and is curated by Amy Moorefield. The presentation at Telfair is curated by Erin Dunn, curator of modern and contemporary art.
Learn more about Free Family Day October 2021 here.
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