An art exhibit honors the historical Black community of Walden Woods

Whit Harris, “The Prospector,” 2025. (Jacquinn Sinclair/WBUR)

Down the wooded path, Whit Harris’ “The Prospector” sits on the grass. The facial profile sculpture is a striking indigo — a dye made more powerful by the transatlantic slave trade. The large work contrasts beautifully with the emerald-colored foliage. Harris imagined Freeman as a prospector, she noted in her artist statement, “close to the land — pressing into it, listening through it — as a way of forming a deeper connection with it.” With smooth, flat rocks near its eyes on the ground, it almost appears to cry.sae
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Online• Jun 17, 2025

Nine Contemporary Artists Respond to an Overlooked Black History at Walden Woods in “Weaving an Address”

At the Umbrella Arts Center, “Weaving an Address” unfolds across gallery and forest, tracing the afterlives of a Black community once rooted in Concord through fabric, sculpture, and speculative memory.

Review by Erwin Kamuene

Whit Harris, The Prospector, 2025. Foam, plaster, paint, Appx. 5 x 4 x 4 feet. Photo courtesy of the Umbrella Arts Center.

The exterior portion of “Weaving an Address” troubles itself with inquiries like those above. Supplementary to the interior portion, which attests to the ways Black people have interpreted a history pockmarked by absences, the exterior portion gazes into those absences and imagines possibilities. Whit Harris’s The Prospector (2025) is a large, blue sculpture of half a face positioned at a fork in the trail. The face lies earward on the ground, blue stones scattered around it. It appears as if it’s in the process of sinking into the earth, as its soft, prehistoric grimace stares outward. Whether the face enjoys it, the sculpture presents a oneness between the earth and flesh.ulnorm

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My sculpture, The Prospector, is on view through October 18th as part of The Umbrella Arts Center’s outdoor exhibition “Weaving an Address,” curated by Marla McLeod and produced in partnership with The Walden Woods Center.