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Exhibit portrays Underground Railroad
This digital photomontage, entitled “Running Man,” superimposes the anti-slavery symbol on a stone wall in Fort Erie, Ontario, with downtown Buffalo across the river. Photo: Courtesy UB Art Gallery
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“Marc’s work has alternated between self-revolving, diaristic approaches and broad explorations in history and culture.”
Stephen Marc, a noted African-American photographer and digital montage artist, has spent nearly a decade on the road in the U.S. and Canada documenting the places and people associated with America’s Underground Railroad.
The network of secret routes and safe houses used by escaping enslaved African-Americans is the subject of “Passage on the Underground Railroad,” an exhibition of complex digital montages by Marc that will be presented Sept. 10 through Oct. 17 in the UB Art Gallery in the Center for the Arts.
The exhibit, which will take place in the first-floor gallery, will be free and open to the public. A public reception for the artist will be held from 5 to 7 p.m. on Sept. 10. Marc also will speak at 6:30 p.m. Sept. 14 in 112 Center for the Arts as part of the Department of Visual Studies’ free, public speaker series.
The exhibition will also include the related book Passage on the Underground Railroad: Photographs by Stephen Marc (University Press of Mississippi, 2009). Sandra Olsen, director of the UB Art Gallery and curator of the exhibit, says the book features 87 full-color images; an interview by Carla Williams, editor of the journal Exposure; along with essays by Keith Griffler, UB associate professor of African and African American studies, and Diane Miller, national coordinator of the National Park Service’s Network to Freedom.
“Stephen Marc is a nationally recognized photographer and digital montage artist whose work addresses the many forms taken by the African diaspora,” says Olsen.
He has been called a “modern griot,” or storyteller, who visually connects the past of African-Americans to the current black experience with stunning, even chilling, relevance.”
The exhibit, Olsen explains, comprises two series: the Underground Railroad sites and montages. “In the sites series, Marc has documented the individual Underground Railroad locations with photographs taken inside and outside the historical structures, as well as the surrounding landscape.
“In the montage series” Olsen continues, “he marries the landscape to slavery through the use of plantation sites, primary source documents and other remnants of slavery from diverse sources, many of them collected by the artist, and combines these with pertinent modern cultural references.
“Woven together digitally, the final images create narratives that generate insightful juxtapositions and bring the past palpably into the present,” she says, adding that Marc will provide texts for each photograph that summarize the narratives and identify salient artifacts.
This project was begun during Marc’s 2000 residency at CEPA Gallery in Buffalo, and three of the 35 Underground Railroad sites employed in this exhibition are in Western New York. They are the Michigan Street Baptist Church in Buffalo, a legendary Underground Railroad station; Murphy Orchards in Burt, where, for more than 20 years, the McClew family sheltered escaped slaves before moving them to the next station; and the Root House in Pekin, home of abolitionist Thomas Root, which was one of the last stops on the railroad. From here, in the 1850s, former slaves were transported to the Canadian border hidden in farm wagons full of produce.
Olsen says that in preparation for this show, Marc took thousands of photographs at more than 100 historic sites in the United States and Canada, and collected a vast number of artifacts, documents and historic photos for use in his montages.
“After months of experimentation,” she says, “he settled on the panoramic format of presentation, using as few as four and as many as 20 digital photographs in each, the largest measuring 18 inches by 81 inches.
“Marc’s work has alternated between self-revolving, diaristic approaches and broad explorations in history and culture,” Olsen says, noting that his first book, Urban Notions, focused on the three Midwestern cities where he grew up or visited frequently, and has been described as “a cross between decisive moment documentary style and fine art formalism.”
His 1992 monograph, The Black Trans-Atlantic Experience, features his photos of Ghana, Jamaica, England and the United States, which he employed to illustrate the British Colonial slave trade route.
Marc’s prestigious awards include the 2009 Elizabeth and Mallory Factor Prize for Southern Art and fellowships from the Midwest Regional National Endowment for the Arts, the Aaron Siskind Foundation and the Mellon Research Fellowship from the Virginia Historical Society.
A professor of art at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, Marc has received ongoing support from Olympus Imaging America Inc. Olympus Visionaries program, and through the National Park Service’s National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom program.
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