Black Revolutionary Women: 250 Years of a Colony Within a Colony

Through installation, performance, and collage, Noelle Lorraine Williams uses a multidisciplinary approach through her project Black Power! 19th Century, exploring how Black women and their descendants lived under systems that treated them as property within expanding Colonial economies. The exhibition also considers how New Jersey, New York, and Philadelphia were shaped by Dutch, Swedish, and British Colonial rule on Indigenous Lenapehoking land, and how enslaved Black women were forced into conditions Williams describes as a “colony within a colony,” where freedom was limited and often unstable.

Williams, a public humanities specialist, artist, researcher, and historian, draws on extensive archival research, including thousands of “runaway” and “freedom seeker” advertisements and narratives from across the Americas. Her work engages histories of resistance throughout the Atlantic world, where Black women continually pursued freedom under multiple European colonial regimes.

In the exhibition, Williams combines historical images, text, and materials such as thread, fabric, newspapers, photographs, archival artworks, and elements of popular culture. She brings together both official historical imagery and forms associated with women’s craft to retell stories of everyday resistance and freedom-making that are often left out of traditional history.

The exhibition is the culmination of Project for Empty Space’s two-year Artist In Residence program, which supports artists through long-term development, public engagement, and experimentation. The program is designed to build meaningful connections between artists and communities, encouraging new artistic work and dialogue around social equity and shared experience.