The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics

Cristina Migliaccio, Medgar Evers College

---

 

Link to Knight Lab StoryMap Version

 

In this article, I examine contemporary public art representations of Frederick Douglass as instances of queer phenomenology in practice. These multimodal works do not simply commemorate a historical figure; they orient viewers toward particular ways of encountering Black history in public space. As Sara Ahmed reminds us, orientation is never neutral: objects direct bodies toward some histories while leaving others out of line (2006, pp. 14-16). Public art, especially when rendered across analog and digital forms, can therefore feel stabilizing to some audiences while producing disorientation, discomfort, or refusal in others.

Rather than treating such responses as interpretive failures, this article approaches them as evidence of how these artworks function queerly—by troubling inherited lines of recognition and expectation. What counts as a “proper” image of Douglass is not located solely in the artwork itself, but emerges through its placement, sponsorship, circulation, and uptake. Read through queer phenomenology, these public representations resist straightening devices that fix Douglass within singular narratives of respectability or historical closure. Instead, they expose how collective memory is produced through contested orientations, inviting viewers to negotiate history not as a settled object, but as something lived, felt, and unevenly encountered across space, media, and bodies.

As a professor of writing at Medgar Evers College in Crown Heights (Lenapehoking), a Predominantly Black Institution and the only CUNY college named for a civil rights activist, this place and legacy orients my attention toward stewardship, accountability, and anti-racist pedagogies. In Ahmed’s terms, my own orientation, shaped by the institution’s name, its local histories, and my daily movements through its spaces, also frames what comes into view as “Douglass” and what feels out of line or in need of reorientation, much like the public art pieces I examine here. I begin with the Frederick Douglass / Liberty mural (2021) in Easton, Maryland, before turning to The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass mural, and concluding with animated renderings of Douglass circulated on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter). Read together, these works move across public walls, institutional interiors, and digital space, each reorienting Douglass through different material, technological, and affective conditions. I aim to trace how public memory shifts as cultural rhetoricians reinterpret historical figures across media, and how those shifts invite competing forms of attachment, refusal, and accountability. Taken collectively, these objects also raise a persistent question that mirrors my own institutional orientation: who are, or who should be, the stewards of historical memory as it moves, mutates, and accrues meaning over time.

 

Frederick Douglass / Liberty

In September 2021, a mural of Frederick Douglass was erected in Easton, Maryland—a community close to where the abolitionist activist, writer, and public speaker was born, and one in which he has a long legacy both as an enslaved and free man. Local white restaurant owners Amy Haines and her husband, Richard Marks, commissioned the Frederick Douglass / Liberty mural after a friend sent them a copy of artist Adam Himoff’s linocut portrait of Douglass, which the artist later adapted into the large-scale mural installed in Easton. The couple “ordered the larger-than-life portrait of Douglass as a way to honor the famed abolitionist and to bring more public art to Easton” (Wise, 2023). The mural quickly became a focal point of controversy and criticism. While some applaud the modern-day representation of the iconic social reformer, others, including his family members, see the mural as defamation and a misrepresentation of Douglass’ ideals.

What would Douglass think of Adam Himoff’s depiction of him enacting the rap squat (or prison pose), often reenacted by artists and others in the media? Toughness may have been Himoff’s complimentary interpretation of Douglass, as explained by him in a 2023 article:

The intent of this image has always been to examine Frederick Douglass’s legacy through the lens of modern times and modern culture…to bring him into the present and ask the question, “What would Frederick Douglass be like if he were alive today? I believe he would be someone who could powerfully connect with young people and inspire them to continue his work of rooting out injustice.” (Himoff in Miller, 2023)

Though Himoff’s hybridized version of the Douglass portrait professes to depict a “modern, determined, and fearless” (Himoff Instagram, 2021) version of the activist, it also reflects the artist’s positionality as an educated, technologically savvy, white male –one who may be more concerned with capitalizing on recent cultural movements in the U.S. (#BlackLivesMatter) than actually participating in them. As per Himoff’s October 18, 2021 Instagram post, the Douglass image was offered as a limited edition poster for sale by the artist to his followers: “There will be only 40 prints in the edition, it will be hand-printed on archival print paper, and, in this first offering, it will be selling for US $250 plus shipping costs'' (Himoff Instagram, 2021). Douglass' fifth-generation nephew, Tarence Bailey, problematizes the modern-day adaptation of the image and Himoff’s assumption that all “young people” will interpret the remix of Douglass as inspiration:

He wore a pocket watch, a gold pocket watch that he let his grandkids play with. The Converse tennis shoes, the pose... I'm pretty sure a lot of African Americans have had a family member send a picture home from prison, and he is in that same pose…It's a place that we don't ever need to go, and it's disrespectful to our elders, to our ancestors, to everybody. (Bailey in Miller, 2023)

What Himoff’s Instagram account does not tell us is that Richard Marks, who purchased the Easton, MD version of the mural, is not only a community member of Easton, but also a philanthropist who bought and donated a second copy of the mural to The Reginald F. Lewis Museum of African American History & Culture in Baltimore, MD. The mural was displayed on an exterior wall of the museum through December 2024, and spectators were enthusiastically invited by the museum's African-American President, Terry Lee Freeman, to discuss and interrogate the piece:

No, your eyes are not deceiving you, that is a rendering of Maryland’s own Frederick Douglass, posing in a pinstripe suit, fancy watch, and sneakers. Not unlike the mission of the Lewis Museum, this contemporary Linocut of Douglass seeks to provoke questions and conversation. (Freeman, 2024)

 

The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

While the Easton mural’s controversy stems from its contemporary reinterpretation, another portrayal of Douglass by Detroit-born African American artist Leroy Foster also invites debate. Foster created The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass in 1972 to honor an 1859 meeting between Douglass and abolitionist John Brown in Detroit. Commissioned by the International Afro-American Museum and installed in the Frederick Douglass branch of the Detroit Public Library, Foster’s depiction was influenced by Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco and includes religious imagery that appears to deify Douglass in the style of Renaissance art.

Foster’s depictions of Douglass through a Eurocentric, canonical artistic framework, which would likely appeal more to a traditional, elite (white) public familiar with the Renaissance, are problematic. The nude image of Douglass breaking free from bondage, too, may be perceived as either primordial or hypersexualized, two tropes of Black men (Curry, 2017; Curry, 2021) that have been used to legitimize slavery and other forms of Black oppression that Douglass sought to dismantle. Ahmed would argue the controversy of the mural is rooted in the ontology of objects: “To queer phenomenology is to make strange what is familiar” (p. 95). The mural reorients normative interpretations of Douglass as a “recorder of deeds [and]…U.S. marshal,” but not necessarily as the image of “the man that fought for the rights of women and all Black folk” (Bailey in Wise, 2023). It provokes questions about how marginalized bodies often navigate and reorient space.

What might a contemporary Frederick Douglass look and dress like? How might this depiction make different possibilities attainable or proximate for some Black viewers, particularly younger viewers or those accustomed to contemporary visual and cultural codes, despite the dismay expressed by Douglass’s descendants and other Black community members who read the image as disrespectful or misaligned with his legacy? As Reginald Lewis Museum President Freeman asserts in an interview with AFRO News, “Historic figures are representative of their time, but if they could time travel, would the exterior affect their intrinsic intellect? I think not.” (Turner, 2024)

Ahmed’s point that “objects that are in line also create lines” (p. 90) cautions interpretations of public art as works of a singular, collective memory. Works like the Frederick Douglass / Liberty mural function as “rhetorical outlets that in each interpretation grant viewers an active role in the process of meaning making” (Rivera, 2020, p. 120). They reimagine marginalized subjects (Baca, 2009) and create a queer phenomenology of normalized, exclusionary historical narratives—new, alternative lines that redirect and “[create] impressions that move us” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 72) toward new understandings. In a 21st-century Easton, MD, some, like resident Kathy Bosin, are reoriented by the mural toward hope: “When I look at that image, I see the future. When I look at that image, I think that any young person I see, maybe on the street, could be the next Frederick Douglass. It reminds me that there’s leadership and new leaders everywhere,” (Wise, 2023). The mural urges viewers to reconsider the recording of history as a subjective practice.

 

Deep Nostalgia / X 

Notably, a few months before the Easton mural was erected, Black studies scholar La Marr Jurelle Bruce used Deep Nostalgia technology developed by MyHeritage to animate two photos of Douglass in X posts. In each micro-video, Douglass moves his head in a way that simulates real life. A screenshot of the first video below, dubbed the #DouglassSelfie by Black digital humanities scholar Marisa Parham, appears shockingly real and artificial at the same time. The post garnered 1,200 comments, 83,000 likes, 18,000 reposts, and 3,300 bookmarks, illustrating cultural reach and Ahmed’s premise that “phenomenology helps us explore how bodies are shaped by histories, which they perform in their comportment, their posture, and their gestures” (pp. 56-57). The issue, of course, is that Douglass’s performativity, in this case, is fabricated, shifting the orientation of X users, and establishing an imaginary of the activist “which [viewers] cannot reach” (Ahmed, p. 55).  

Perhaps as important as the videos are the attendant posts that Bruce makes to explain the Deep Nostalgia technology and the ambivalence the videos make him feel:

Although ancestry platforms are not new, Deep Nostalgia introduces a distinct form of disorientation by algorithmically animating still photographs through preset movements, producing an uncanny effect that unsettles long-standing assumptions about photographic realism and the boundary between what feels “real” and what does not. The problem with Deep Nostalgia is that, unlike the installed Easton mural, this tech circulates freely across platforms, leaving Black (and other) bodies open to manipulation by anyone. Bruce’s commentary emphasizes the discomfort with the possibilities this technology produces, a feeling Parham calls "the uncanny valley…the discomfort you feel when a digital render looks enough human to look human, but is also just enough off to signal that it is anything but" (2021). The uncanny valley operates as a catalytic disorientation that alerts viewers to something being off, prompting critical distance rather than identification and enabling more deliberate engagement with digital representations and culture. Ahmed might describe this as a moment in which familiar lines of orientation falter, making visible the histories and power relations that usually remain aligned and unseen. 

Considering representations of Frederick Douglass across these multimodal, analog, and digital works of art reveals the broad, shifting, and at times unwieldy nature of representation in today’s information-saturated culture. Read through queer phenomenology, these compositions do more than re-present Douglass for contemporary audiences; they intervene in how Black history circulates, is taken up, and is put to use across public space, institutional settings, and networked platforms. Attending to Douglass in particular matters because he was himself deeply invested in the politics of visibility, self-fashioning, and public address, conditions that make his afterlives especially generative for thinking with Ahmed about how orientations are produced, disrupted, and reworked through multimodal practice. In this sense, queer multimodality does consequential work in the world: it composes disruption by refusing settled, “straight” narratives of historical authority, and instead, produces moments of disorientation that demand accountability, interpretation, and response. By tracing how Douglass moves across murals, exhibitions, and digital animations, this article highlights queer multimodal rhetoric as a materially consequential practice, one that shapes publics, reorients institutional memory, and opens space for more contested, relational, and responsible engagements with Black history in the present.

 

References 

Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer phenomenology: Orientations, objects, others. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822388074.

Baca, D. (2009). The Chicano codex: Writing against historical and pedagogical colonization. College English, 71(6), 564–83. https://doi.org/10.58680/ce20097168.

Bell, B., & Deserea, M. (n.d.). Beach to bay heritage area - Frederick Douglas. We Are Limitless Studios, https://www.wearelimitlessstudios.com/murals/beach-to-bay-heritage-area-frederick-douglas. 

Bernier, C.-M., et al. (2015). Picturing Frederick Douglass: An illustrated biography of the nineteenth century’s most photographed American. WW Norton & Company.

Bruce, LM. J. [@Afromanticist]. (2021, Feb. 28). my sense of wonder might be tinged with a sense of terror. so it goes [Tweet]. X (formerly Twitter). Screenshot by the author.

Bruce, LM. J. [@Afromanticist]. (2021, Feb. 28). (also be cautious of the the potential for video forgery, mass deception, the rise of the robots, artificial intelligence gone amuck...[Tweet]. X (formerly Twitter). Screenshot by the author.

Curry, T. J. (2021). Appealing because he is appalling: Black masculinities, colonialism, and erotic racism. University of Alberta. 

Curry, T. J. (2017). This nigger’s broken: Hyper-masculinity, the buck, and the role of physical disability in white anxiety toward the Black male body. Journal of Social Philosophy, 48(3), 321–43.

Foster, L. (1972). Life and times of Frederick Douglass [Mural]. Antislavery Usable Past. https://antislavery.ac.uk/items/show/351. 

Freeman, T. L. Frederick Douglass [Mural]. Reginald F. Lewis Museum, Baltimore, MD, United States. 10 July 2024, https://www.lewismuseum.org/frederickdouglassmural/.

Himoff, A. (2021, October 18). Frederick Douglass [Photo]. Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/CVLZTZoJ-Jm/.

Miller, L. (2023, November 17). Controversy surrounds new Frederick Douglass mural in Easton. WBOC.  https://www.wboc.com/news/controversy-surrounds-new-frederick-douglassmural-in-easton/article_99a15956-85b8-11ee-a55f-536cb0e5c864.html.

Parham, M. (2021, April 24). This morning in Blackness: Deep nostalgia edition. Medium. https://bytes.salt.codes/this-morning-in-blackness-deep-nostalgia-edition-cc11 7ed844af.

Rivera, N. K. (2020). Chicanx murals: Decolonizing place and (re)writing the terms of composition. College Composition & Communication, 72(1), 2020, 118–49. https://doi.org/10.58680/ccc202030893.

Trent, N. (2025). Frederick Douglass | Accomplishments, education, early life, family, & writings. Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Frederick-Douglass.

Turner, C. (2024, September 20). Reginald F. Lewis Museum hopes to spark conversation with new Douglass mural. AFRO American Newspapers. http://afro.com/adam-himoff-mural-frederick-douglass/.

U.S. National Park Service. (2024, February 21). Frederick Douglass and the power of photography. Retrieved from https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/frederick-douglass-and-the-power-of-photography.htm.

Wise, A. (2023, December 21). A Frederick Douglass mural in his hometown in Maryland draws some divisions. NPR. NPR, https://www.npr.org/2023/12/21/1219768084/a-frederick-douglass-mural-inhis-hometown-in-maryland-draws-some-divisions.