Harriet Tubman and the Combahee River Raid
[Featured image: And I Shall Smite Thee (detail), 2018 by Stephen Towns. Natural and synthetic fiber, glass beads, and metallic buttons. Private Collection.]
‒ On view May 23 through October 5 at the Gibbes Museum of Art ‒
The Gibbes Museum of Art, a beacon for the arts in the American South since its establishment in 1858, announces the world premiere of Picturing Freedom: Harriet Tubman and the Combahee River Raid (May 23 ‒ October 5). The visionary multimedia exhibition is inspired by the award-winning book by Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black (the Pulitzer organization just announced that her book won the 2025 Pulitzer in History). Her book Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War (Oxford University Press) details a previously untold chapter in our country’s history. On that fateful moonlit night in June of 1863, Tubman led the largest slave rebellion in the U.S. history. Dr. Fields-Black is descended from one of the participants of the freedom raid. The museum exhibition brings to life the heroic raid, when 756 enslaved people liberated themselves in six hours ‒ more than ten times the number of people Tubman rescued during her ten years of work on the Underground Railroad. The raid was carried out by one of the earliest all-Black regiments of the Union army.
The Gibbes Museum has invited Dr. Vanessa Thaxton-Ward as the guest curator for the Picturing Freedom exhibition. She is the Director of Hampton University Museum, and hand-picked artworks from institutions and private collections across the United States. Never before has a grouping of works of this size and scope, honoring Harriet Tubman throughout more than 100 years of American artmaking, been presented this way. She has selected artworks by major artists (including Jacob Lawrence, Faith Ringgold and William H. Johnson), and by emerging contemporary artists (including Stephen Towns, Terry Plater, and Kevin Pullen).The paintings, sculptures and mixed media works are featured alongside photographs of the region by J Henry Fair, video and audio installations, historic images, and material objects.
“The freedom seekers would have been tortured, some put to death, had they been caught,” said Angela Mack, the former president and CEO of the Gibbes Museum of Art. This landmark exhibition marks the culmination of Mack’s 44-year tenure at the Gibbes. This will be her final exhibition at the Gibbes, as Mack will retire this year. She joined the museum in 1981 as Assistant Curator, eventually becoming Chief Curator in the 1990s and Executive Director in 2008. “This exhibition encapsulates what I hoped to convey during my four decades at the Gibbes Museum – telling the powerful stories of the Charleston region through the visual arts, and championing the legacy of artmaking in the South,” says Mack.
J Henry Fair has photographed the area for 30 years. “The photographs by J Henry Fair shine a light on how dangerous it was for the enslaved laborers to flee during the raid, through deadly tidal rice swamps with snakes and alligators,” says Mack. “While Fair’s work usually focuses on the environment, this exhibition marks a new turn for his photography ‒ linking together his images of nature with the ordeals of enslaved people, and the untold history of Harriet Tubman’s military service. His striking images of this serpentine landscape immerse viewers in the perils enslaved people faced in this treacherous terrain,” adds Mack.
The Gibbes Museum’s Picturing Freedom exhibition was three years in the making. In 2022, Dr. Fields-Black and Fair approached Angela Mack about the concept of a museum exhibition. “As an art museum we immediately recognized the importance of placing a visual history around this historic milestone ‒ to tell this story through art,” says Mack. “This is an epic American story with a national legacy and universal impact.”
Although this uprising was orchestrated and guided by Tubman, biographies, history textbooks, and films about her life omit this crucial chapter. The Union Army hired her to work deep in slave territory, to gather intelligence for the daring raid up the Combahee River to attack the major plantations of Rice Country. She commanded a ring of spies, scouts, and pilots behind Confederate lines.
Tubman and her crew piloted two regiments of Black U.S. Army soldiers, the Second South Carolina Volunteers, and their white commanders up the Combahee River in three gunboats. In a matter of hours, they liberated hundreds of people whose language and culture Tubman could not even understand.
When Tubman and the gunboats arrived and blew their steam whistles, many of those people raced onboard and sailed to freedom.
“It was exciting to see how many artists through the years have created works that portray Harriet Tubman, in so many different mediums,” said Dr. Vanessa Thaxton-Ward, the guest curator. As part of her curatorial process, she explored why artists continue to turn to images of Harriet Tubman and the Combahee River region to express ideas of freedom and legacy. “I want this exhibition to show that Tubman was a whole person – she was more than the conductor of the Underground Railroad. She was a wife, she was a mother, she was a daughter. Through this exhibition, we see how Tubman was also a human being who had feelings, who had a family,” adds Dr. Thaxton-Ward. “We also wanted to show how hard life was for enslaved laborers in the rice fields, especially the children. Many of these families were brought to the region because of their prior knowledge of the rice culture in West Africa.”
Thanks to the extensive research and book by Dr. Fields-Black, these enslaved laborers are finally given names and stories, to permanently inscribe them into the historical record.
During the year-and-a-half that Dr. Fields-Black lived in the region to research her book, she walked through the terrain where the historic river raid took place ‒ in the middle of the night under the light of the moon, to retrace the journey of the freedom fighters.
After the war, many returned to the same rice plantations from which they had escaped, purchased land, and started families. They created the distinctly American Gullah Geechee dialect, culture, and identity, celebrated today as one of Harriet Tubman’s most significant legacies.
Descendants of these communities have now named this African diaspora the Gullah Geechee Nation, showing genetic admixtures from Central West Africa, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Bights of Benin & Biafra. The Gullah Geechee culture is marked by its unique language and living styles. It is important to note that Dr. Fields-Black’s ancestors are from this area near Charleston and the Combahee River region, she is of Gullah Geechee descent.
The exhibition will feature a video re-enactment of the night of the freedom raid. One of the enslaved laborers who was freed during the raid will be portrayed in the video by the South Carolina-based actor, educator and author Ron Daise, known for his advocacy of and expertise in Gullah culture and language.
The Legacy section of the museum show also includes audio installations featuring some of the descendants that Dr. Fields-Black and Fair interviewed. There will be QR codes next to each photo of the descendant, so that museumgoers can click and listen. Material objects include the large scale West African mortar and pestle that was gifted to Dr. Fields-Black during her research trip to Africa.
One of the artworks visitors will see in the exhibition is titled “Can you break a Harriet,” by Kevin Pullen, an artist based in St. Simons, Georgia. This work reflects the legacy aspect of the exhibition, acknowledging that for over a decade, people have been working to have Tubman honored on the U.S. $20 bill. On Veterans Day, November 11, 2024, Tubman was posthumously commissioned as a Brigadier General by the Maryland National Guard. She was the first woman in the U.S. to lead an armed military operation during a war, yet she was never given official status by the military and fought for decades for her military pension. Now, more than a century after her death and 160 years after her military service, Harriet Tubman was named a general.
About the Gibbes Museum of Art
The Gibbes Museum of Art, a beacon in the American South for arts and culture since 1858 when the Museum’s art collection was founded, is heralded as one of the earliest and most longstanding arts institutions in the United States.
The Museum’s collection spans 350 years, including contemporary, modern, and historical works. With world-class rotating exhibitions and a dynamic visiting artist residency program, the Gibbes is a Southern museum with a global perspective. The Museum’s mission is to enhance lives through art by engaging people of every background and experience with art and artists of enduring quality, providing opportunities to learn and discover, to enjoy and be inspired by the creative process. Museum hours and visitor info are here.
