Portals & Passages: Works by Robert Freeman & Max Stern

Portals & Passages explores the possibilities of liminal space through the paintings of Robert Freeman and photographs by Max Stern. Both artists depict images sited on the threshold: windows, doorways, tunnels, tree-lined passages, and other found openings. Such portals and passages function as transitional spaces that connect or separate worlds: interior and exterior, known and unknown, before and after. As such, these intermediary places can represent exciting possibilities or harrowing rupture. A simple door can be a portal to freedom or a formidable barrier, a symbol of hope and catharsis or estrangement and loss.

Robert Freeman’s paintings explore the darker side of this experience. Inspired by a recent trip to Ghana, where he spent part of his childhood, Freeman’s paintings depict the slave castles at Elmina and Cape Coast. These fortresses were used to hold enslaved Africans before they were loaded onto ships and sent to the Americas as part of the transatlantic slave trade. Freeman’s paintings attempt to process and purge the grief and anger he experienced after spending hours in the dungeons where his ancestors were forced to live in captivity.

A prominent feature of the slave castles are the Doors of No Return, passages through which enslaved people were taken from the castles to the slave ships, never to return. Freeman depicts these Doors in several of his paintings, actual physical thresholds marking the boundary between the enslaved person’s free life before and the brutal unknown life of slavery beyond. The Doors are powerful, visceral markers of the enslaved person’s ruptured experience. Freeman’s two largest paintings in the exhibition, Afrika and Modern Day Slave Ships, extrapolate further on the transatlantic slave trade, the Middle Passage, and the movement of people and material resources from Africa to the Americas.

Freeman’s work in the exhibition is rounded out by colorful paintings of the Aburi Botanical Gardens, located outside of Ghana’s bustling capital city of Accra. The sunny gardens were a childhood favorite to visit for Freeman, and a cathartic balm to paint as an adult. The heavy contrast between the colorful garden paintings and stark slave castle imagery produces its own, unseen, liminal space within this body of work; a transitional void contemplating the disparity between freedom and enslavement.

Max Stern’s photographs depict a multifaceted experience of architectural and natural openings. Stern is captivated by a still photograph’s ability to create mystery or stimulate curiosity.  His images of portals and passageways inspire a myriad of questions in the mind of the viewer: What is on the other side? Where does this lead? Where are they going? His photographs capture the tension of liminal space, the anticipation of the unknown. Drawn to these transitional, in-between spaces throughout his career, Stern has found such moments in locations around the world, from Germany to Barbados.

To Stern, a photograph – a snapshot of a single moment – has the potential to be more exciting than live action. As an undefined moment in time, a still image possesses limitless possibilities for storytelling. Stern’s images are small peeks into another world, and merely suggest what has, is, and will take place. As the artist, Stern creates these worlds, but it is up to the viewer to flesh them out – to determine what lies at the end of the passage, beyond the portal.

Freeman and Stern are longtime friends and have previously exhibited jointly with vibrant paintings and photographs of Mardi Gras Indians in New Orleans. Portals & Passages represents their second showing together. The artists both see their work as interpretive, provoking questions of which neither has the answers. In both bodies of work, the audience is just as integral as the art itself, filling in the blanks, becoming the storytellers who determine what these portals and passages mean and where they lead. Though only two works in the exhibition directly reference each other – Freeman borrowed from the imagery in Stern’s Rothenberg for his own Door of No Return – the paintings and photographs are complementary, each exploring the transitory and uncertain nature of the threshold as a conduit for a multitude of often contradictory emotions and experiences.

Portals & Passages: Works by Robert Freeman and Max Stern is on view March 14 through May 19, 2024. Please join us for a reception with the artists, Thursday, March 14, 6-8pm.