In Charleston, South Carolina—neighboring the humid edge of the tidal Combahee River, where the swamps once swallowed enslaved bodies—the Gibbes Museum of Art unveils a reckoning. On view from May 23rd through October 5th, Picturing Freedom: Harriet Tubman and the Combahee River Raid serves as an artistic insurgence, reframing the largest slave rebellion in U.S. history and reconceptualizing the iconography of Harriet Tubman. Tubman, often embalmed in bronze and recounted in fragments, is here made whole: strategist, mother, daughter, spy, and a revolutionary.

The exhibition, driven by the Pulitzer-winning book Combee: Harriet Tubman and the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War by freedom raid descendant Dr. Edda L. Fields Black, returns to a single electric night in June of 1983. Under a moonlit sky, Tubman led the largest liberation of enslaved people in U.S. history, freeing 756 people in six hours. Curated by Dr. Vanessa Thaxton-Ward, the show resurrects Tubman’s overlooked legacy with urgency and care.

“The freedom seekers would have been tortured, some put to death, had they been caught,” said Angela Mack, the President and CEO of the Gibbes Museum of Art. This landmark exhibition marks the culmination of Mack’s 44-year tenure at the Gibbes, during which she has emphasized the untold stories of Charleston through art. “This exhibition encapsulates what I hoped to convey—telling the powerful stories of the Charleston region, and championing the legacy of artmaking in the South.”

The exhibition is anchored by a video reenactment of the raid, while haunting environmental photographs by J. Henry Fair trace the treacherous rice fields crossed at dark. One artwork, Can You Break A Harriet by Georgia-based sculptor Kevin Pullen, confronts the viewer with Harriet Tubman’s unfulfilled legacy. Over a decade after efforts began to place her as the face of the $20 bill, and 160 years after the Combahee raid, Tubman was only posthumously granted military recognition on Veteran’s Day 2024.

Picturing Freedom doesn’t end with Tubman or the participants of the freedom raid. It is the Gullah Geechee culture, born from the very same rice plantations, that whispers back through time. It is the language of those fields that rises up in tribute. The footsteps running through water. The urgency through a whistle in the dark. And now stands the image of Harriet Tubman, no longer running underground, standing in the center of the frame. Here, grace beckons a reconciliation between history and memory, silence and story.