New exhibition tells the story of the fight to end transatlantic slavery, its aftermath and legacies
Rise Up: Resistance, Revolution, Abolition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge is the story of the fight to end transatlantic slavery, its aftermath and ongoing legacies, co-curated by Professor Victoria Avery (1988).
Focussing on the period from 1750 to 1850, the exhibition explores the stories of resistance by individuals and communities from across the Caribbean, Europe and the Americas.
It does so using an interrogation of historic objects and artworks in conversation with works by contemporary artists.
Rise Up shows how prevailing racist ideologies and stereotypes were repeatedly challenged through the written and spoken word, visual images, material culture and performance. However, the curators faced some difficulties. Victoria said: “The historic institution of slavery attempted to silence Black voices and cultural practices. Countless Black lives have been marginalised or erased from historical narratives and the mainstream art and culture of the period. This means that a lot of what would be desirable historic visual and material culture to include in the show is lacking – either because it was never made or was not deemed important enough to warrant collecting. Since all exhibitions are necessarily object-led, this absence presented us with some serious curatorial challenges.”
When we first interviewed Victoria Avery for Johnian Magazine back in 2022, she was keenly focused on “making (art) collections accessible”. This ambition has been carefully honed during her tenure as Keeper of European Sculpture & Decorative Arts at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.
In her opening curator’s insights talk on Saturday 15 March for the launch of Rise Up: Resistance, Revolution, Abolition, which follows on from Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance (Sept 2023–Jan 2024), Victoria told how she and the show’s co-curator Wanja Kimani had set about telling an object-based story of the fight to end transatlantic slavery from 1750–1850. They wanted to do so through the lens of people, both individual life-stories and group biographies, “in order to bring the humanity back into this global story of big stats that can become very depersonalised,” she said.
“Every one of those 12.5 million African people estimated to have been trafficked across the Atlantic during the 400-year history of the slave trade was somebody’s mother, husband, friend.”
Where possible, Victoria and Wanja have used historic material to tell these stories, including abolitionist texts published by Black Georgians in Britain from the 1770s onwards. In the second room, dedicated to ‘The British anti-Slave Trade Campaign’, they gathered first edition copies of key autobiographies written by Black abolitionists together with little-known autograph letters from these authors, many from Cambridge collections.
The Rise Up audible soundscape includes the names of some of the enslaved women recorded on a plantation inventory at the start of the show, as well as the names of some of the 3,000 formerly enslaved African American men, women and children who were relocated as Black Loyalist refugees from New York to Nova Scotia in 1783, following the American War of Independence. Recordings of historic music in the show increase accessibility to key loans: thanks to Haitain baritone and researcher Jean Bernard Cerin and the Lisette Project, Rise Up has a world-exclusive recording of a piece of music commissioned for the Kingdom of Haiti, which has rarely been heard since the Kingdom fell in 1821; and thanks to Dr Nicole Cherry and her students at The University of Texas at San Antonio, Rise Up visitors can hear a brand new recording of a piece by Cambridge alumnus George Bridgtower that has never before been available as no recordings exist.
In a few cases, Victoria and Wanja were able to showcase artworks by historic Black artists, including the painting of King Henry I of Haiti’s San Souci palace painted by Haitian-born Numa Desroches in c. 1815, and now in a New York private collection, or the equally rare sampler stitched by Susannah Edwards, a ‘Liberated African’ school girl in a Church Missionary Society school in Sierra Leone, in December 1833, which was recently acquired for the Fitzwilliam Museum’s permanent collection.
Many works by contemporary artists are also included in Rise Up, mainly by Black British, African-American and Caribbean artists, to contribute to the wider understanding of Rise Up’s key themes. Some of these contemporary artworks are new acquisitions by the Fitzwilliam like Nana by Jamaican-born New York-resident artist-writer-activist Jacqueline Bishop. Made especially for Rise Up, itcelebrates the Caribbean market woman as a direct link to her West African forebears: “women who, despite the inhumanity of the plantation system, maintained agency and autonomy” as Jacqueline puts it in the Rise Up exhibition catalogue. Others are loans, such as the trio of powerful portraits by Haitian-born François Cauvin of Haitian Revolutionary leaders including Toussaint L’Ouverture and Sanité Bélair.
Cambridge’s role as a centre of abolitionism in the 1780s is explored in the exhibition. It spotlights individuals such as Peter Peckard who used his influence as Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University to publicly decry the moral evils of slavery and racial inequality and support the work of Equiano. Peckard’s radicalism inspired future leading abolitionists, including Johnians Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce. Among the key loans to the exhibition are Clarkson’s ‘Cabinet of Freedom’ campaign chest of 1787–88, the campaigner’s ‘travelling museum’ that provided tangible anti-slavery evidence to the Privy Council inquiry.
The Rise Up exhibition is accompanied by a book with contributions by several of the contemporary artists, and the public programme, which also includes them in the ‘Meet the Artist’ talks.
Rise Up: Resistance, Revolution, Abolition is on at the Fitzwilliam Museum until 1 June 2025.