Emma K.

Emma K.’s Artist Statement:

I decided to make this art from silhouettes since we don’t actually know what any of the people looked like (from drawings or pictures or descriptions). The people on the right are Theophilus’s owners. They’re standing in front of the house he was enslaved in. On the left, the smaller people are Theophilus’s family, and the bigger figure is Theophilus. I decided to use black and white so they would stand out, and also because back then people thought black and white were the only things that mattered. The background is made up of documents about Theophilus, and I decided to do that because the documents were where we got most of our information, so I feel like they’re important. I feel like finding information on him was as hard as fighting a tiger, and even though it was difficult, I learned a lot about his life and story, and saw that he was a very important person.