Freedom is Not Guaranteed

Sited on one billboard at the corner of E Hastings St and Hawkes St, Vancouver.

Each age finds it necessary to reconsider at least some portions of the past, from points of view furnished by new conditions which reveal the influence and significance of forces not adequately known by the historians of the previous generation.¹ – Frederick Jackson Turner

In portrayal and critique, Freedom is Not Guaranteed home the elements of dynamic photography and storytelling, sowing seeds for public discord through lens-based imagery becoming sites for ontological investigation. Bold, hand-drawn lettering, crude yet composed, stamps the left of the image, superseding a blurred pointing figure of a Black woman standing in fields of knee-high yellow stalk beneath a blue-grey sky. The gesture of the point: to direct, delineate, reference, and an assertion against North America’s socio-political climate, past, present, and future, is further grounded by what may be read as a metaphorical positioning of frontier,² a paradoxical and philosophical construction of possibility, however fraught. Xaviera Simmons’s practice interrogates narratives using photography as a “revelatory reparative mechanism”³ to navigate the ways in which we continue to unsettle the landscape and our relationship to it. They are a historian, an agentic medium, across painting, sculpture, photography, and media works, forming a visual record of Black life, underpinning the cyclical imperative of artists to undo/create. In this, Simmons’s work challenges the notion of the witness with a more deeply situated task of implication, universalizing a warning, a whistle – uncertainty as far as the eye can see. Commissioned by the artist-led organization For Freedoms in 2018 as part of their 50 State Initiative, Simmons’ Freedom is Not Guaranteed has been exhibited in South Dakota, Brooklyn, NY, and Washington, DC, and to mark For Freedoms’ first Canadian collaboration, in Vancouver, BC’s Downtown Eastside. Each location further contemplates the vulnerability of humanity and the imposed veil of progress masking the loose threads of white supremacy, censored speech, misinformation, history suppression, reparations, Indigenous sovereignty, incarceration, housing, poverty, anti-Black racism, misogyny, trans rights, a continuum of systemic assurance, and the poetic questioning of progress.

Freedom is Not Guaranteed by Xaviera Simmons is curated by Artspeak Gallery and commissioned by and presented in partnership with For Freedoms.

1. Frederick Jackson Turner quoted in Margaret Washington, “African American History and the Frontier Thesis,” Journal of the Early Republic 13, no. 2 (1993): 230–41, www.doi.org/10.2307/3124089.
2. The use of “frontier” is in reference to the histories of Black settlement established communities. These settlements were often established by Black Loyalists, fugitive slaves, and Black soldiers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
3. “Xaviera Simmons: the witness as the reparator,” KADIST, interview, 2022, 15 min., 18 sec., posted on YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQwIGs-EapM.