The Role of Art in Our Collective Freedom

In 2026, the United States will mark 250 years since its founding. At New America, we believe this milestone offers us a chance to celebrate our progress, reckon with our past, and recommit to building a more equitable nation.

New America’s Us@250 initiative—through its first class of fellows—is working to broaden the American narrative to envision a future that truly values equality, justice, and freedom for all of us.

As part of this storytelling work, scholar-activist and Us@250 Fellow K. Melchor Quick Hall recently facilitated an art exhibition to spotlight Black feminist visions of shared liberation. Held at Charleston, North Carolina’s historic Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture, the installation featured the work of four core artists—sculptor Darrell Ann Gane-McCalla, fiber artist Marla McLeod, painter Destiny Palmer, and quilter Kimberly Love Radcliffe—and local artists whose work highlights local reparations activists and civil rights histories. The installation runs through Saturday, April 27, 2024.

As we close out Black History Month, we sat down with Melchor to discuss the exhibit and the importance of art in imagining our collective freedom.

New America’s Us@250 initiative seeks to “put the ‘us’ back in the ‘U.S.’”—a feeling that we all belong. What does this spirit of inclusion mean to you, and how does it manifest in your work?

The notion of inclusion speaks to a history of exclusion. It involves bringing someone or something into view that has been marginalized. However, even the question of what occupies the margins is a matter of framing. My work shifts the frame by centering communities who have always been at the center of their own lives. It celebrates voices that do not represent the popular focus, and framing. Black feminist artistic visions are a wonderful starting point for engaging popular audiences in a discussion about racial repair. It honors the legacies of Black feminist art that always have been present.

Your fellowship project is centered on facilitating an artist-led “freedom visioning” workshop for individuals interested in our shared liberation. Tell us more. What inspired you to focus on this topic?

The “Aiming for Freedom: Race, Reparations, and Right Paths” traveling exhibition emerged from a series of reparations workshops that supported white, U.S.-based inheritors of wealth in the collective redistribution of resources. Over the course of three years, the workshop redistributed $150,000 to Black individuals and organizations. With workshop popularity peaking at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, interest waned in subsequent years, and I pivoted to a focus on Black creatives as inspiration for a path forward. I believe that this visual work will inspire people in ways that text alone rarely does. Through art, it is possible to see pain and triumph; the works embody the nuance of a history of struggle and joy. I wanted to share work of the artists who inspire me, and bring their work into conversation with other artists creating aspirational visions during challenging times that require reckoning and repair.

Pride in our nation’s progress, reckoning with its past, and aspiration for a brighter future—these three concepts are at the heart of the Us@250 initiative. Which of these do you relate to or find to be the most important as we get closer to the nation’s 250th anniversary?

The “Aiming for Freedom” exhibition both reckons with a troubled racial history and aspires to support the co-creation of a world that centers community dialogue about our path forward. In recent years, popular discussions about the racial wealth gap and federal reparations have been at the center of the work of economists and historians. These academics provide useful information about the country’s past. And if we believe that harm can be quantified, they might even help us to calculate the cost of repair. However, we need creatives to support us in imagining a new future.

“Hope is not anything given to me; it is co-created in community with others committed to our freedom.”

Since we can not go back in time, we must do more than repair the harm, or calculate the compounded damages of that harm; we must imagine an alternative that does not reproduce and recreate the harm. This is creative work; it is the work of artists. And that is the vision of the “Aiming for Freedom” traveling exhibition.

Importantly, the public engagement will not simply focus on abstract notions of freedom, but will engage concretely with issues of the carceral state. As a postdoctoral fellow with Wellesley College’s Anti-Carceral Co-Laboratory, I look forward to a future installation that will feature conversations with formerly incarcerated women and the daughters of (formerly and currently) incarcerated persons. In that context, we want to include all aspects of freedom, acknowledging contemporary material realities of carceral confinement and surveillance.

The “Aiming for Freedom” traveling art exhibition features Black feminist visions of shared liberation. How do you envision the role of Black art in reimagining the American story? How do you hope this helps change hearts and minds?

I think less in terms of a reimagining and more in terms of shifting the frame. Black folks have been here, making history, telling our stories, and living creatively in the midst of racialized (and gendered) violence. Building new abolitionist worlds where we experience shared liberation and reciprocal care is creative work. This kind of work does not need much media support. Already, it is keeping many of us alive. It is the network of mutual aid that sometimes goes unnoticed when there is a focus on wealth. Gardeners will tell you that plants grow in the direction of the light. In that way, I believe that focused attention on various visions of mutually supportive and caring communities committed to our collective healing will support the growth of that way of relating to our shared humanity. By calling for Black feminist artists in various communities to share their freedom visions and inviting others to join in the conversation, I believe we can expand these communities of mutual aid and reciprocal care.

What gives you hope for the future beyond 2026?

For me, hope is not an aspirational type of waiting; instead it is something that we make together through our committed actions in solidarity with others. It is collaboration within this Us@250 fellowship cohort that wants to see a better tomorrow. It is the work of these visionary artists. Together, we make hope through working towards our shared vision of a freer future that repairs the harms of racialized legacies of slavery, segregation, mass incarceration, policing, and, more recently, discriminatory surveillance technologies. Hope is what we make—in community with one another—in order to create freer, more compassionate and caring communities for all segments of our society. Hope is the process of replacing systems that discard people with systems that heal. Ultimately, hope is not anything given to me; it is co-created in community with others committed to our freedom.

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