2023
Acrylic panel, LED light, plywood, and Maryland Sassafras soil
A line of white light divides a dark reflective circle. The glowing horizon is both boundary and beacon—calling you to approach as it recedes. A ring of soil links this work to abolitionist Harriet Tubman (c. 1820–1913). Nekisha Durrett gathered this earth at the foot of a tulip poplar known as the Witness Tree on Mount Pleasant Acres Farms (formerly Thompson Farm) in Preston, Maryland, with permission from its stewards, Paulette Greene and Donna Dear. Born into slavery near this site, Tubman escaped in 1849. She returned in 1854 to rescue her father Ben, a free laborer, and her enslaved brothers Ben, Robert, and Henry. The sculpture’s circumference echoes the growth of the Witness Tree’s trunk, creating a record of continuity between past and future.
Durrett was inspired to make this sculpture as she engaged with a well-known historical photograph of Tubman. While depicting Harriet Tubman faithfully from the photograph, Durrett began to wonder: “How would I represent her interior, the vastness of her mind?” She set out to make a portrait centering Tubman’s agency, as though encountering the world through her eyes. Frontier allows for new images and thoughts of Tubman to emerge, offering a place where you can see yourself reflected as the consequence of Tubman’s foresight to act on behalf of future generations.
The artist’s work contemplates biases and the unreliability of memory, as information is filtered over time through a white patriarchal lens. Durrett illuminates individual and collective stories of Black life and imagination, addressing her own younger self—a Black Washingtonian educated in Maryland—and what she wished she had learned.