ARTIST STATEMENT

On December 2, 1859, radical abolitionist John Brown stood on the scaffold awaiting the drop of the gallows floor. He was sentenced to hang in Virginia because a month and a half earlier he and a mixed-race group of radical abolitionists took over the federal armory in Harpers Ferry with the aim of creating an insurrection that would end the Slave Power. He stood for a full ten minutes with the hood over his head and the noose around his neck. He waited patiently as the military gathered information to witness his execution. He had already issued this final statement: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.” The work in this show expands from that ten minutes spanning the deep past into our present.

Folklore and myth seep into this telling. Stories are alive, they are promiscuous. They slip the borders. John Brown’s Vision on the Scaffold is steeped in American history and storytelling. I created a series of portraits of the people around John Brown as if they were my sitters. Behind them outside, beyond the window, something else transpires: a reference to something older, or bigger that casts light on their story. The landscape is an essential character in the work. The consideration of tree time is necessary. The slow perception of trees creates a longer narrative arc. Tree time allows connective tissue to reach over centuries.

Daniel Duford John Brown’s Vision on the Scaffold, 2018, watercolor on paper

Here John Brown waits on the scaffold with a noose around his neck. His vision opens up to a great tree, with deep roots and a spreading crown. At the foot of the scaffold are two of Brown’s heroes: Joseph Cinqué, who led a revolt of many Africans on the Spanish slave ship La Amistad, and Nat Turner, the enslaved African-American preacher who led a four-day rebellion of both enslaved and free Black people in Virginia in 1831. Just beyond Cinqué and Turner is Robert E. Lee, who arrested Brown and shortly thereafter became a leader and embodiment of the Confederacy.

Daniel Duford John Brown and Thoreau at the Stump of the World Tree, 2018, watercolor on paper

John Brown and Henry David Thoreau stand at the foot of a massive stump—the world tree or Yggdrasil, the mythic center of the universe. The men stand in a living forest. Abolitionism and ecological thought are intertwined; the culture that devastates human life will surely devalue non-human lives.

Daniel Duford The General and Supermax, 2018, watercolor on paper

John Brown and Harriet Tubman (also known as “The General”) lead an anonymous contemporary man out of a Supermax prison. Brown and Tubman are both conductors on the Underground Railroad and mutually respected one another. In this painting, several time periods overlap, stressing the continued need for abolition in an era of mass incarceration.

Daniel Duford Abolitionists in a Flood, 2019, oil on canvas

Here seven prominent abolitionists are arranged, as if sitting for a formal portrait, while rising waters from a flooding forest pool around their calves. They are all at different points in their lives, thus creating an anachronistic scene. John Brown holds one of the pikes he had made to arm those that he broke from bondage. An older Gerrit Smith holds the flooding cup; Emily Dickinson holds a sword, and Harriet Tubman holds a lantern. These attributes correspond to the four suits of the tarot: the wands, pentacles, swords and cups. Also in the group are Henry David Thoreau, William Lloyd Garrison, and Frederick Douglass. In the far background is the Fisher King from the Arthurian legend. His wound is metaphoric of the dying environment: If the sovereign is ill, so too is the land.

Daniel Duford Co-Conspirators: The Amistad, 2019, acrylic on canvas

This portrait depicts the five Black men who joined John Brown on his raid. Osborne Perry Anderson, the figure who holds the curtain, is the one of the few men to escape alive. He was an educated freeman who joined Brown. Dangerfield Newby, in the red suit, had escaped slavery and joined Brown to rescue his wife and daughter who were going to be sold down south. He carried a letter from his wife which was found on his corpse. Lewis Leary is wearing a hat in the foreground; John Copeland is behind him, and in the back left is Shields Green, with his arms crossed. In the background, The Amistad is blocked by a line of contemporary riot cops.

Daniel Duford The Secret Six: Chain Gang Cotton, 2019, acrylic on canvas

The Secret Six were the wealthy Northern backers of Brown’s operation. Outside of the window is an image from a Texas chain gang, where the prisoners were forced to pick cotton. Included in the portrait are George Luther Stearns in the foreground; Franklin Sanborn at the table; Samuel Gridley Howe in profile; Thomas Wentworth Higginson; and in the far back, Gerrit Smith. Theodore Parker, the bald man on the left, famously said, “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.” A century later, Martin Luther King, Jr. paraphrased these words in in a statement he read in 1956 following the conclusion of the Montgomery bus boycott.

Daniel Duford The Warriors: The Three Sisters, 2020, acrylic on canvas

In this portrait, five women who fought for abolition and women’s suffrage stand in front of a window. In the distance there is a traditional Iroquois garden of the three sisters (corn, beans, and squash) in front of a traditional longhouse. In the foreground are Mary Ann Shadd Cary, editor, author, activist and the first Black woman publisher in the U.S. and the Grimké sisters, Sarah Moore Grimké and Angelina Emily Grimké, prominent activists for abolition and women’s rights. The Grimké sisters were raised on a southern plantation but later renounced their upbringing and wealth to fight for abolition. In the background are three more women. Sojourner Truth was born enslaved and, later, as a freedwoman became one of the leading activists for abolition. Harriet Forten Purvis holds the overflowing cup from the tarot or the grail legend, symbolic as a source of overflowing life and soul renewal. In the far back is Charlotte Forten Grimké, anti-slave activist, poet, and educator.

Daniel Duford The Brown Family: All Present, 2020, acrylic on canvas

This portrait depicts all of the Brown family members who were present at the raid on Harpers Ferry, including Brown’s daughter Annie and his daughter-in-law Martha. His son Owen, the only son who escaped, holds the slaughtered lamb. Owen Brown is shown here as an old man, as he looked in his final days in California. A huge tornado surges outside the window, a nod to the Kansas prairie and the cultural storm that ensued during the Civil War.

Daniel Duford Mary Brown: The Handless Maiden, 2019, acrylic on panel

In this triptych of three women, each sitter is a wife of a more prominent abolitionist; each one of these women made their husband’s work possible by taking care of the house and home. In each portrait, there is a view out of a background window that refers to a folktale or a myth in which a woman is transformed and gains agency through travails in the forest.

Mary Brown, wife of John Brown, bore many children and had to oversee the household with almost no money, especially during the family’s move from Springfield, Massachusetts to North Elba, New York. With almost no resources, Mary Brown held her family together. She, too, had a strong moral compass. The tale of “The Handless Maiden” is a story in which a poor miller has to cut off his daughter’s hands in exchange for endless wealth granted by the devil. She wanders through the woods, meets a prince, marries him, then through further trials learns to grow her own hands back.

Daniel Duford Helen Eliza Garrison: The Three Spindles, 2019, acrylic on panel

Helen Eliza Garrison was the wife of The Liberator publisher William Lloyd Garrison. She was a powerful intellectual force in her own right. “The Three Spindles” is a European folk story in which a young woman, pregnant out of wedlock, is nurtured by fairies in the forest. In exchange for her son born in the woods, she is given three magic spindles that confer wealth to her as long as she always remembers the reciprocity of the forest.

Daniel Duford Anna Murray-Douglass: The Bear Mother, 2019, acrylic on panel

Anna Murray-Douglass was not an intellectual like her famous orator husband, Frederick Douglass. Like Frederick, she escaped slavery. She was the rock that kept their home together. “The Bear Mother” is a foundational Indigenous myth told throughout North America. It tells the story of a woman seduced by a powerful man who turns out to be a bear. She gives birth to twins. Her brothers come to kill her husband, but not before the bear teaches his sons the correct relationship between bears and humans.

Daniel Duford Still Life with Conductor and Demon Dogs, 2020, acrylic on canvas

Duford’s still life paintings are a way of focusing large mythic scenes within the mundane and everyday. Still life painting is traditionally a celebration of earthly abundance while also depicting the fleeting nature of life. According to Duford, still life is a genre that emerged out of the abundance of European wealth resulting from colonization, slavery, and extraction from native lands.

Here the signalman’s lantern points to John Brown’s role as a conductor on the Underground Railroad. Brown is seen in the background, holding the flag that he designed to usher in a new Afro-centric, post-slavery constitution. The devil dogs that pace around the table come from Southern folklore. They are harbingers of death and trouble. They also speak to the feral energy of roving gangs of white men called “Safety Patrols,” who harassed and captured freed Blacks.

Daniel Duford Still Life with Scaffold and Forest Fire, 2020, acrylic on canvas

John Brown was tried while laid out with injuries sustained during his capture at Harpers Ferry. He had to sit on a cot during the trial. He would stand up with outrage when it was suggested that he acted out of madness and not firm belief. In this painting, he is in a tent, awaiting the gallows. Behind the scaffold is a raging forest fire, connecting the land to the fury of Brown’s actions. Eastern woodpeckers flit above the table.

Daniel Duford Still Life with Bread and Flood, 2020, acrylic on canvas

In this still life, John Brown’s head is on a cake plate. The head, however, is not a dead thing, but sprouts sunflowers, bringing light just as a massive flood enters the door of the plantation house. The two skulls are traditional memento mori symbols, reminding the viewer of the inevitability of death.

Daniel Duford Toward the Gallows the Course of Empire Makes its Way, 2020, acrylic on unstretched canvas

This painting is a riff on Hudson River School paintings, specifically Thomas Cole’s paintings of his house in the Catskills. The title refers to an Emmanuel Luetze painting, Westward the Course of Empire Makes Its Way. John Brown was made to sit on his own coffin as he was driven to the gallows. He calmly remarked on the landscape as he passed. This is the dream of landscape of the American Empire. The gallows is at the end of a thread, not the redemptive West.

Daniel Duford Time Tree Divinations for the Scaffold, 2020, oil on panel

These paintings are to be seen as divinatory images like tarot cards. Arrangement and proximity adds to the reading of each painting. The pictures tell the story of the wooden scaffold and the building of the American Empire through the experience of the trees.

Hive the Bees

This painting depicts a wild bee hive in a tree. John Brown said that he wanted Frederick Douglass to “hive the bees,” meaning to gather the newly free people to himself to create an insurrection

Long House

A traditional bark and wood building of the Algonquin people.

Mast Pine

A living mast pin

Tall Mast: Empire Builder

The pine masts of North America helped to power the colonial empire building of England. The massive, straight pines were felled and skidded down to the waterfront, giving rise to the term “skid row,” a term which also suggests a part of a city where the desperate and impoverished are forced to life.

Railroad Ties

The railroad cut through the landscape, forever altering the speed between America’s coasts and felling whole forests to cut the ties needed for the tracks. The railroad created massive displacement of Indigenous peoples and ecological communities.

Clear Cut

The building of the empire on the backs of the enslaved required—and still does require—the massive clearing of ancient forests.

Raid Headquarters

This was the Maryland farmhouse that John Brown and his raiders lived in as they gathered intel and weapons, and planned the insurrection at Harpers Ferry.

Cicada

The cicada’s song is a part of of the sonic fabric of the Eastern and Southern United States. This insect can stay dormant for thirteen to seventeen years, awaiting the right conditions to emerge, mate, and die. The trees are their emergent sites.

Log Cabin and Pike

The pike was the weapon of choice for John Brown because it was cheap, easy to distribute, and needed no reloading. He planned to distribute a pike to all the people he freed. Here it leans against the rough-hewn corner of a log building typical of 19th century Virginia and Maryland. The handle of the pike and the logs that make up the walls of the out-building retain their arboreal memory

Ratatoskr

Ratatoskr is the squirrel on the world tree in Norse mythology. He is a gossip who spreads lies between the eagle at the crown and the serpent at the roots.

Well-built Gallows

The gallows, with a massive rain storm approaching.

Trees on Old Railroad Bridge: Harpers Ferry

A view of trees growing out of the old railroad bridge supports in modern day Harpers Ferry on the Potomac River.

Daniel Duford, Untitled, 2020, charcoal wall drawing

Daniel Duford The Bread Lecture, 2020, unstretched canvas scroll (acrylic on canvas); ceramic bowls, letterpress cards

Throughout Duford’s studio output, he has often invoked the image of bread, and the story about how bread is made, as a metaphor for the creative process and emotional and intellectual sustenance. In a spoken word performance he calls “The Bread Lecture,” he describes the entire process of baking from making a sourdough starter to shaping loaves to eating the baked bread with others.

Duford’s storytelling takes place before a narrative painted on a canvas scroll in a delivery similar to a cantastoria, a theatrical form in which the performer tells or sings stories while gesturing to a series of images. Duford invites in Greek goddess Demeter, Vermeer’s milk maid, and David Drake (Dave the Potter) as characters. At the end of Duford’s “Bread Lecture,” he passes out starter to further perpetuate the feeding of the soul and belly.

john brown's body book.pdf