At Historic Stagville, Maya Freelon Uses a Delicate Medium to Draw Out History’s True Colors 

At an empty house on the rural outskirts of Durham, a slip of color flutters persistently in a window. Through the warped glass of the house—the Bennehan Home at Historic Stagville, built in 1799—the color appears ghostly; a trick of light. 

This vision is from artist Maya Freelon’s tissue-paper sculptures, which sprawl throughout the former plantation in a site-specific exhibition, activating the rooms with figures and scenes. Entitled Whippersnappers: Recapturing, Reviewing, and Reimagining the Lives of Enslaved Children in the United States, the show opens November 16 and runs through January 25. 

“The exhibition is about the preciousness and the joy of childhood,” Freelon says. “How a child can find a happy place in anything. They’re able to exist in terrible conditions and still be resilient.” 

Dozens of Freelon’s archival photo monoprints are on display, made with her signature “bleeding” tissue paper technique. Some photographs are sourced from Jess Vanhook, Freelon’s romantic partner and collaborator. Vanhook’s grandmother kept an extensive archive of family photos throughout the 20th century—scenes of Black life in sweet, casual repose. 

“My grandma makes photo albums for everybody,” Vanhook says. “Everybody in these photos I’m pretty sure has a copy, but she keeps one for herself, too.”  

Other photographs are sourced from the U.S. Library of Congress, which funded Whippersnappers through its Connecting Communities Digital Initiative. 

While researching at the Library of Congress, where she was a 2024 artist/scholar-in-residence, Freelon searched for 19th-century photographs of Black children shown in happy moments—rare images, though a precious few, like a sunny photograph of a small Black girl laughing in a field, have slipped through the cracks of history. Freelon reimagines that photo as “Beautiful Flower,” an image overlaid with collaged tissue as if caught in a swirling vortex of time and color. 

The intention with Whippersnappers, Freelon says, is to make Black history—one still actively repressed and erased—feel more alive, as she evokes the playful, hopeful spirit of children facing unbearable circumstances. 

Michelle Lanier, director of the NC Division of State Historic Sites and Properties, says the exhibit is a first at Historic Stagville. 

“We’ve been imagining the possibilities of activating spaces,” Lanier says, “particularly spaces that have been touched by the stories of people who lived in human bondage.” 

Lanier adds that she feels particularly connected to the project because her ancestors were, as she calls it, “land kin” to Stagville—enslaved people who created lives and families in places much like this. 

“We see the visual arts as a powerful invitation for people to come close to narratives that are traumatic,” she continues. “In the experience of the art there is a possibility for medicine, for healing.” 

“I could’ve just left it at ‘Whippersnappers,’” Freelon says of the project’s title. “But I wanted people who read it to say out loud—that children were enslaved here not that long ago.” 

“Here” could be countless geographies touched by the transatlantic slave trade. Today, the reference is to Historic Stagville. 

To get here from Durham proper, you will drive down Old Oxford Road, snaking along the Eno River, past farms and the ominous-looking confines of Treyburn corporate campus.

At one time, this land—owned by the powerful Bennehan and Cameron families, united in 1803 by the marriage of Duncan Cameron and Rebecca Bennehan—was another kind of massive complex, with farms, workshops, and mills sustained by the unpaid labor of enslaved people. 

At their peak, the Cameron-Bennehan landholdings were 30,000 acres, a swath of piedmont land encompassing parts of what are now Wake, Durham, and Granville Counties. By 1864, Stagville was one of the wealthiest plantations in the South and the largest site of mass slavery in the state, with more than 900 people enslaved (and dozens more enslaved at other Cameron properties). The state now owns a fraction of the estate: 165 acres, preserved as an educational site. 

Historical tours sometimes manage to romanticize the era, with cheery docents cradling wicker baskets; this experience, however, is much more thoughtful. It begins in Horton Grove, where enslaved families were kept, and outlines the experiences—the great suffering from forced family separations, as well as the many forms of resistance carried out—of the generations who lived there. 

On an original chimney at Horton Grove, our guide, a volunteer named Liz Henderson, points to bricks bearing thumbprints of the enslaved people who worked on it. There are also five pea-sized toe prints: the footprint of a young enslaved child. 

Here, after news reached that Robert E. Lee had surrendered in 1865, enslaved people gathered for a midnight vigil. According to the autobiography of enslaved person Morgan Latta, who was 12 at the time: “Husbands prayed that they might see their wives again, and the wives prayed that they might see their husbands again, and the children prayed that they might see their parents again, and also their sisters and brothers.”

Two weeks later, the last major surrender of the Confederate army occurred at Bennett Place, about 12 miles south of Stagville, effectively ending the Civil War.

The weather is beautiful today, mild and pacific. Our tour winds through a grove—all new; this would’ve all been farmland 200 years ago—to a white barn that enslaved craftsmen built by hand in 1860. Henderson draws our attention to a massive pine beam shouldering the length of the interior—an old-growth forest tree. 

It’s Tuesday, which means it’s also Election Day; timing that is coincidental (tours are unavailable on Mondays) but nevertheless makes the landscape feel freighted with meaning.

Evidence of an old-growth forest makes Stagville feel old; the young trees, and ongoing events of the election, make it feel young. 

As the tour wraps up, Henderson asks if anyone has questions. An older woman teasingly pokes at Henderson: “It doesn’t seem like you like the Camerons very much, do you?” 

Henderson replies that the research she’s done makes that a bit hard. She mentions Paul Cameron’s reputation for violent drop-by visits at Horton Grove and emphasizes that plantation owners’ wives were also culpable, often reinforcing their husbands’ violence. 

The woman presses on. “But not all slave owners were violent, right?” she asks. “Like, there must’ve been a range?”

Henderson is quiet for a moment. “I think,” she finally says, “that the act of owning another person is always inherently violent.” 

With that, the tour is done. Everyone continues with the day, awaiting election results. 

Maya Freelon was born into a profoundly artistic heritage: her parents are prodigious jazz musician Nnenna Freelon and renowned late architect Phil Freelon; her grandfather Allan Freelon was an educator and impressionist painter.

Her grandmother Franny, as Freelon writes on her website, taught her granddaughter to quilt, reminding her that “we came from a family of sharecroppers that never got their fair share.” 

Freelon has used tissue paper as a medium since she was in graduate school at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. There, while living with her grandmother, she stumbled upon a stack of papers that had, over time, been transformed by the elements—leaks from a pipe streaking colors between the pieces, blurring their boundaries. She was mesmerized. 

Numerous museums, including the National Gallery of Art and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, have since featured Freelon’s work. She is named for her godparent Maya Angelou—a close friend of her grandmother’s—who once described the paper sculptures as “visualizing the truth about the vulnerability and the strength of the human being.”

That balance of fragility and resilience is evident in Whippersnappers. An otherwise cheap item—$1.99 at drug stores, held together with Elmer’s glue—resourcefully transforms a site of violence into a prism that refracts hidden histories outward.

The sculptures will be on display in six rooms of the Bennehan house, as well as in the barn, accompanied by a “motion-activated soundscape composition” created by Nnenna Freelon and ethnomusicologist Allie Martin at a consecration event earlier this month. Opening-day events include a roundtable discussion with Lanier, Maya Freelon, and curator-at-large Johnica Rivers; on December 14 there will be a community tissue quilt workshop. 

As for the slave owners, we know a bit about them (though not much is online, save some very friendly interpretations of their lives on local history blogs). With the end of the Civil War came an era of sharecropping, a practice that evolved into debt peonage, locking farming families into poverty. 

The men in the Cameron family continued to pass down powerful positions: Duncan Cameron served five terms in the NC General Assembly; Paul Cameron was a state senator and UNC trustee; and Paul’s son-in-law John Washington Graham was a high-ranking Confederate soldier in the Battle of Plymouth—a massacre of several hundred Black Union soldiers, emancipated laborers, women, and children in Washington County. 

Graham would go on to devote his life to suppressing Black rights and granting amnesty to white supremacists. He is buried in Hillsborough. The family names live on throughout Triangle landmarks—including Graham Residence Hall at UNC-Chapel Hill, Cameron Avenue in Chapel Hill, and Cameron Village in Raleigh (since renamed the Village District).

History must be seen with a gimlet eye. What Historic Stagville does so well is demonstrate how many stories are folded into that history and how those legacies shape Durham—particularly neighborhoods like Bragtown, Hayti, and the West and East Ends—today. 

“Descendants of the enslaved artisans, engineers, and agricultural minds of Stagville,” Lanier says, “have been increasingly seeing the land that held the feet of their ancestors as a place of gathering.” 

Freelon’s work is particularly effective seen in a small front office at the Bennehan house: here, Freelon says, the name of every child born into slavery at Stagville was written down in a ledger—a property record. In the exhibit, those names are projected out, a wraith on the wall. A tissue-paper sculpture of a child, meanwhile, is positioned in an innocent posture of play. 

Enslaved children at Stagville wouldn’t have had shoes, but Freelon placed a pair of Converse on the figure, borrowed from Nova, her eight-year-old daughter. 

“Maya has invited in the voices of those children whose names we may never know,” Lanier says. “She has brought that very careful research into harmony with the land and the structural spaces of Stagville.” 

All this makes Whippersnappers a particularly great exhibition for children to see. If they’ve only encountered history in beige, Whippersnappers shows it in an imaginative technicolor that blends the past and future, the tiny toe prints of one child alongside the small Converse of another. 

“Can we all agree that childhood is precious?” Freelon asks, standing in the Bennehan house by a row of photos. “Can we find joy and peace in curiosity? Can we enter a space that was once used for oppression and transform it into a space where we can imagine a new world?”

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