Quest: We Who Believe in Freedom Cannot Rest, 1993
Offset Lithograph
Edition of 90
30 x 22 in
Collaborative Printer: Bob Franklin
The print Quest: We Who Believe in Freedom Cannot Rest illustrates a couple in a doorway of a structure that is either a house or a building. A photographic image of a neatly dressed Black couple contrasts sharply with the expressionist renderings of the walls and roof of the building from which they emerge. The walls and roof seem to symbolize the outlines of an iconic 19th-century image depicting the Middle Passage, slaves stored in the holds of ships bringing Africans to the Americas. The title alludes to the role of the institution on Black marriages early on and its disruption and denial through the institution of slavery. The visual narrative suggests the nature and history of slavery and the quest by slaves and their descendants born into slavery for freedom to choose who to love, marry, bear children with, and raise a family. It would seem to urge Black family descendants to never forget the various dimensions of the quest for basic human rights denied and the legacy of slavery's effect on the Black family.
