This project was commissioned by the University of Massachusetts, Museum of Contemporary Art, to be a public work project in 2022-23, and available as free posters at various sites on campus in conjunction with the museum's exhibition "60 years of Collecting".

Borderland Where Freedom Grows
In this collection of drawings entitled “Borderland Where Freedom Grows” (words borrowed from the 1949 W.E.B. Du Bois essay “Thinking and Writing”), images and objects from UMass archival collections are interpreted as landscapes in which people and plants interact with public space on ethereal campus lawns. As a means to reimagine ecology as part of our public, the works combine shapes of native grasses and meadow plants and draw from archival images of students engaging in public dialogue and dissent, protest signage, solidarity cloth, printed broadsides, strike processions, and banners.


All the Stars We Have Known // Negro History Week, 1949, read by Cheryl Townsend Gilkes

photo credit: Stephen Petegorsky