In Re-Imagine: Lifting the Veil, the project is informed by W.E.B. Du Bois’s seminal work The Souls of Black Folks, and it’s impact on the effects of chattel-slavery on the enslaved children. The concepts of “double consciousness” and “the veil,” are visually expressed by incorporating research from Colonial-era Lousiana Historian Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy 1718-1820 database. The project provides a counter-narrative to historical accounts that center an oppressive perspective and offers a vision of a future free from the constraints of this double consciousness. This project’s process was to recreate these portraits of enslaved children and utilizing archival descriptions, artificial intelligence, and lenticular printing to achieve a contrast of those enslaved transitioning to a world free from chattel-slavery with a vision for the future. The lenticular print technique allows the work to visually engage a viewer multiple perspectives within a single artwork.
Re-Imagine: Lifting the Veil is a project informed by W.E.B. Du Bois's seminal work, The Souls of Black Folk, and its exploration of the effects of chattel slavery on enslaved children. The concepts of “double consciousness” and “the veil” are visually expressed through the incorporation of research from Colonial-era Louisiana historian Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy 1718-1820 database. This database provides detailed records of over 100,000 enslaved Africans.
The project recreates bronze sculpture portraits of enslaved children from the Whitney Plantation Museum using archival descriptions, artificial intelligence, and lenticular printing. It provides a counternarrative to historical accounts that center on an oppressive perspective. The lenticular prints allow viewers to interact with multiple perspectives within a single artwork, visualizing a transition from enslavement to a future free from the constraints of “double consciousness.”
W.E.B. Dubois’s concept of “The Veil” has been critically analyzed by scholars and artists alike since he first used the phrase in his ground-breaking book, “The Souls of Black Folk,” at the turn of the 20th century. “The Veil” was a literary and philosophical translation of the lives of people of African descent in the Americas.
It operated as a soothsayer, a third eye or as referred to within the book a second sight. This forward-thinking vision continues today as it functions as a guide or perspective lens for people of African descent to re-imagine the struggle within a system built on structural racism.
This series re-imagines lifting “The Veil” allowing the second sight that was systematically denied to children held by chattel slavery. Deprived of opportunity, dehumanized and cloaked by the veil. By re-imagining slave children’s unfettered access to what DuBois referred to within the book as “Paideia” they are now provided with vision and a future. As Dr. Cornell West states in “Living and Loving Out Loud,”
“Paideia concerns the cultivation of the self, the ways you engage your own history, your own memories, your own mortality, your own sense of what it means to be alive as a critical, loving, aware human being.”
(Cornel West, Living and Loving Out Loud, p. 22)
This series allows a creative expression that merges the concepts of Afrofuturism, and African Diaspora to become a re-imaginative production. Fusion within “The Veil,” allows the concept of paideia to be seen through an enhanced lens for critical interrogation. A space to create re-imagined realities by removing the stigma of otherism. In this series we do not ask for permission to identify the sensation of a double consciousness by lifting the veil; it envisions the world with unlimited opportunity and access and actually creates the vision.
“Surely there shall yet dawn some mighty morning to lift the Veil and set the prisoned free.”
-W. E. B. Du Bois (1903)