- Harriet
November 8th — December 20th, 2025
InMay of 1851, a legal injunction temporarily prevented Kentucky planter James Martin from selling his slave,
Harriet. The injunction was filed by two other planters, Jesse Baker and G.W. Dozier. The case survives only as a single document in the Chicago History Museum’s archive from the Julius Frankel collection: a bond, scanned as two separate files of its recto and its verso.This bond is evidence of a court ruling that determined the injunction was wrongfully issued. Ergo, Baker and Dozier agreed to payMartin $800 as compensation for the damages caused by the halted sale.
The exhibition, however, bypasses the legalities implied by the bond and turns to its archival digitization, to the moment where it was physically turned over to scan—and split into two files—both recto and verso. This mundane act is magnified and recast as the primal scene of an archival scopic drive: the unrelenting desire to see the object from all sides. But what does the bond allowus to see? The document produces more confusion than clarity. Why did Baker and Dozier intervene?What was Harriet to them? Was she payment for a debtMartin owed? Did they mean to buy her freedom? Or was she coveted for reasons the bond does not specify? Answers to these questions are left to speculation but three things remain apodeictic about the story: first is that Harriet would remain for sale, second, that this trace of Harriet may be the only one left, and third, that we have no way of confirming which Harriet this document could refer to. “This” Harriet thus appears to us as a vast ensemble, the crystallization of all possible Harriets.
fsdThe movement from recto to verso and back, extends