A Way of Looking examines the history of places and spaces my ancestors inhabited, with a focus on the Garcitas Community as a Texas Freedom Colony and as a site of post-Emancipation settlement, land-based autonomy, and ongoing struggle over belonging. I compose self-portraits with my back turned to the viewer, set in southern landscapes, connected to a 1845 deed and a 1878 addendum documenting my second great-grandfather, Sam Brown’s purchase of 100 acres of land for 100 pieces of gold in rural southern Texas. This transaction, often read as self-determination, also exposes the limits placed on freedom within systems designed to control Black land, labor, and mobility, even as Freedom Colony communities sought safety, kin-based support, and self-governance through land ownership and shared infrastructure.
To trace this history, I followed the migrations of Robert Gamble Jr., the seller listed on the deed, each location a site of contestation. I ultimately learned he was the enslaver of my ancestor, Sam Brown, who was sold as an asset to settle Gamble’s debts. By presenting myself with my back turned, I invite the viewer into the act of looking at me looking, pressing attention onto power dynamics embedded in observation and in the historical record. I create diptychs that merge images from our family archives with my self-portraits in these landscapes, placing the Freedom Colony record of endurance, settlement, and return beside the ongoing presence of violence and dispossession. These pairings bind past and present, holding resilience and trauma together without resolving either.
