African-American Artists Re-Imagine Norman Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms;” Create an Inclusive Image of America
African-American artists, the New York Times reported on this day, have begun to re-imagine the image of America portrayed in Norman Rockwell’s famous Four Freedoms images. The Four Freedoms originated with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s State of the Union Address in January 1941.
Artist Norman Rockwell’s set of 1943 Four Freedoms posters celebrating Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear are among the most famous images in all of American history. The images were first published in four separate issues of The Saturday Evening Post in 1943, at the time one of the largest circulation magazines in America, and then issued as posters by the federal government to help rouse American patriotism and sell war bonds to finance World War II.
The image of America in Rockwell’s Four Freedoms posters is an all-white country, with no people of color African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Asian-Americans, or Muslim Americans.and with no sense of racial, ethnic, or religious conflict.
In 2012, however, African-American artist Hank Willis Thomas saw Rockwell’s Freedom from Want poster, and was inspired to produce a revised image that would represent his experience of a racially, ethnically, culturally, and religiously diverse America. Assisted by photographer Emily Shur, Thomas rented a house in Los Angeles in May 2012 where they took several photographs reproducing Rockwell’s Freedom from Want with a diverse cast of people.
Other artists had a similar inspiration. Maurice Peterson, an African-American artist in Massachusetts (where he lived a mere 20 miles from the Norman Rockwell Museum) was deeply upset by the infamous 2014 fatal shooting of Michael Brown by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Using his IPhone, he created a composite image titled Freedom from What?, a reworking of Rockwell’s Freedom from Want. The image presents an obviously fearful African-American family, with the parents tucking their children in bed, in an image taken directly from Rockwell’s Freedom from Fear. The father is holding a newspaper with the headline “I Can’t Breathe,” the final words of Eric Garner who was killed by a chokehold applied by a New York City police officer in July 2014.
Hank Willis Thomas has organized For Freedoms, an organization that produces exhibitions, art works, and billboards designed to stimulate civic activism.
Additionally, in response to the then-ban on same-sex marriage in the U.S., Maggie Meiners in 2015 created a Freedom of Religion image with a divers group of people that included Muslim participants.
Learn more about Hank Willis Thomas here
Visit the For Freedoms web site
See all of Maurice “Pops” Peterson “Re-imagining Rockwell” images here
Visit Maggie Meiners’ web site
Read the New York Times article
Visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture here