Free as They Want to Be: Artists Committed to Memory presents contemporary art inspired by historical memory. The exhibition considers in comparative perspectives the historic and contemporary role photography and film have played in remembering legacies of slavery and its aftermath. It also examines the social lives of a diverse group of Americans within various places—on the land, at home, in photographic albums, at historic sites, and in public memory. Free as They Want to Be offers a view of a people who expressed their desire to be free in early photographic portraits.

Lavaughn Belle: The Haunting Between Us presents a counternarrative that haunts the Royal Danish Archive photographs from the Danish colonial period in the West Indies.  LaVaughn Belle disrupts the hierarchies in the colonial images with cuts and burns transforming these construed images.  The sculpture Sovereign (How to Pull a Spear from the Throat) reminds us that rebellion and resistance was waged by the indigenous peoples of the West Indians as well as Africans. As she says, “The haunting is a call to decolonization and the dismantling of systems that keep us fragmented.” Belle works in various disciplines making “invisible the unremembered through exploring the material culture of coloniality creating narratives from fragments and silences.”

This exhibition is a collaboration between the Carlos Museum and CAUAM with a companion exhibition ”Come Ruin or Rapture” on display at the Carlos Museum.