Humanities at UMBC

For nine years Stephen Marc traveled to over half the states in this country to photograph the routes traveled by fugitive slaves in their search for freedom, documenting and interpreting his research along the way. Marc shares the results of these explorations through his thought- provoking, creative, and haunting digital composite images, which he will place into the context of his previous and ongoing bodies of work that focus on locating the black experience within American history.

Marc uses two types of photographic composites to reveal the history of the Underground Railroad (UGRR): multiple photographs that describe UGRR sites and metaphorical montages that address the larger horror of slavery. Each UGRR site has a story, so individual sites are portrayed inside and out, using several photographs in combination to create visual tours. The companion montages evocatively interpret the South's "peculiar institution" from which slaves were fleeing. These multilayered narratives weave together elements from the landscape of slavery--plantation structures, crop fields, waterways, tools of bondage and agriculture, merchant tokens and bank note currency, newspaper articles, and advertisements--along with UGRR site details, antislavery materials, and contemporary cultural references.

Stephen Marc is a professor of art in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University. A member of the Olympus Visionary Program, he has published The Black Trans-Atlantic Experience and Urban Notions.

Passage on the Underground Railroad is an interpretive program in the National Park Service's National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom.

This lecture is presented in conjunction with the Library Gallery exhibit of Marc's work.