He decides to make series of portraits of black men, heroes, courageous soldiers, sometimes also influential women, who lived in a time or operated under circumstances in which their blackness had no negative connotation. Figures that are wrongly missing in the canon.
When he left (the Edna Manly College in) Jamaica, he knew he wanted to support the creativity of young people in particular and give them the opportunity to be self-sufficient. He knew he had to come up with projects that do justice to the Maroon culture. In doing so, he had to involve the population of the region as much as possible.
FROM THE ARCHIVE: March 6, 2021:
If this exhibition was held in the USA, I would first want it to include my Frederick Douglass collection, now housed at the Beinecke Library at Yale University and now available digitally online for all the world to read. I also have several slave narratives in my collection which I would like to see included. I have only one item directly related to the Dutch involvement in slavery which I would have liked to have been included in the current Rijksmuseum exhibition: A Sermon, written by Jacobus Elisa Joannes Capitein, written in 1742, an extremely rare item in the original form.
