In May of 2013, the Toni Morrison Society commissioned a small iron bench to be placed in Walden Woods in Concord, Massachusetts. The structure is dedicated to Brister Freeman, a formerly enslaved man who, along with others like him, formed a community in Walden Woods decades before Thoreau’s time. Inspired by Morrison’s remark of there being no places to “recollect the absences of slaves … no suitable memorial … no small bench in the road,” the bench asks us to consider Freeman’s community as more than just the prelude to a more famous suitor. A call that over a decade later, “Weaving an Address,” on view at the Umbrella Arts Center through October 7, responds to.
Curated by Marla L. McLeod, “Weaving an Address” is a group show featuring work by nine Black artists spread across two spaces. Inside the Allie Kussin Gallery, which is situated in the main lobby of the art center, work by each of the artists commingles. A mile down the road at the trailhead to the Walden Woods, artists were invited to respond to the approximate site where Brister Freeman and his family resided. The exhibition vaults spatial and material constraints, incorporating site-specific textile works, sculptures, photographs, pottery, and architecture.
While confronting the legacy of American slavery, the show is also arriving at a time of frenzied attempts to streamline that history. Be it the systematic purging of historical archives or the clamping down on academic freedoms, efforts to not forget the horrors of American slavery are currently in peril. I was reminded of this when looking at Ida B. Wells Barnett (2018), Kimberly Love Radcliffe’s quilt depicting journalist and activist Ida B. Wells displayed in the main gallery. Renowned for her fearlessness, Wells made herself a luminary—and, in extension, a target—through her extensive reportage of racial violence in the Jim Crow South. Radcliffe portrays Wells in front of a purplish backdrop that sports a zebra print frame. Assembled from different fabrics, Wells, in three-quarter profile, gazes into empty space, looming as a reminder that history, much like quilting, is an additive process.
Elsewhere in the gallery, with Anthony Peyton Young’s quartet of liquor pouches—Joyous Angie, Billy J, Jordan with Afro, and A Tear for Butch (all 2023)—we again see quilting become analogous to history. Riffing on a beloved pastime of Black uncles everywhere, Young quilts buttons, cowry shells, bandanas, and fabrics into cylindrical bags that shield bottles of MD 20/20 and Colt 45. These pieces wink at you while consolidating scraps of a shattered history into something that is not fully a narrative but resembles something close enough.
Likewise fragmentary is the story, or what we know of the story, of Freeman’s community. According to Elise Lemire’s extensively researched Black Walden (the source material for the exhibition), the community originated in the 1790s as a joint enterprise between Freeman and another formerly enslaved man Charlestown Edes. Years before its founding, Freeman had gained his freedom through his service in the Revolutionary War. Since slavery was still legal in all thirteen states at the time, and as his lack of funds made moving impractical, Freeman was stuck in Concord, along with others belonging to the town’s free and enslaved Black population. Some formerly enslaved residents, not wanting to descend into poverty, ended up laboring for their previous owners in return for housing. Freeman instead resolved to buy a plot of land in Walden Woods to move his family to.
Following Freeman’s relocation, the struggle for survival marked the next forty years of his life. The infertile soil made agriculture impossible and small land plots rendered raising cattle too much of a pain. The family at times subsisted off fish, but most of their lives were spent cycling through odd jobs in order to buy and barter for necessities. Zilpah, Freeman’s sister, made a meager living as a weaver known to sing through her work. And Fenda, his wife, turned to divining the fates of locals and passersby as a fortune teller. These details are tragic, yet nonetheless tug at our curiosity. What lives did this community live? What songs did Zilpah sing and what futures did Fenda see? Years after Fenda died, Freeman became romantically involved with a white woman who also lived in the woods. Did this relationship make him uneasy, or did it come as naturally as his previous transgressions?
The exterior portion of “Weaving an Address” troubles itself with inquiries like those above. Supplementary to the interior portion, which attests to the ways Black people have interpreted a history pockmarked by absences, the exterior portion gazes into those absences and imagines possibilities. Whit Harris’s The Prospector (2025) is a large, blue sculpture of half a face positioned at a fork in the trail. The face lies earward on the ground, blue stones scattered around it. It appears as if it’s in the process of sinking into the earth, as its soft, prehistoric grimace stares outward. Whether the face enjoys it, the sculpture presents a oneness between the earth and flesh. Young expands this idea with Eternal Presence: Ancestral Remembrance (2025), which is made up of 100 ceramic face jugs hanging from tree limbs. The jugs alternate between stout and skinny; are painted in blues, yellows, and browns; and unlike Harris’s work, depict innumerable facial expressions. In either case, this oneness appears ironic considering how incompatible Walden Woods was with this community. But this irony is also the story of Black people in America. It’s the drama of living as an exile in your own country, which as these works reveal, is full of joy and pathos and the ninety-nine emotions that comprise them.
It also shouldn’t be ignored how this drama takes place in the North. While the North did not have as large of an enslaved population as the South, it did play a part in upholding the institution. As late as the 1780s, there was a fifty-pound fine for any owner who wanted to free an enslaved person in Massachusetts, none of which went to the freed individual. Clearly, northern municipalities didn’t know what to do with their Black populations when not exploiting their labor and didn’t care to find out. In a series of essays from 1963 by Irving Howe and Ralph Ellison, Howe wondered why anyone would want to live in a cruel place like the South, to which Ellison pointed out: because Black people live there.1 The treacherous experiences “Weaving an Address” illuminates can similarly make one question the silver linings for those who followed Freeman into the woods. But the show’s equal attention to the cultural and spiritual resilience of Freeman, his family, and his neighbors, suggests the same justification as Ellison’s: because Black people lived there.
1 Wellington, Darryl Lorenzo. “Fighting at Cross-Purposes: Irving Howe vs. Ralph Ellison.” Dissent 52, no. 3 (2005): 101-105. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/dss.2005.0077.
“Weaving an Address” is on view through October 7, 2025, at the Umbrella Arts Center, 40 Stow Street, Concord, MA.
