Public artwork reframes US history of enslavement through Jefferson’s valet

In his 1981 inaugural address, Ronald Reagan gazed out at the magnificent vista of Washington DC. “At the end of this open mall are those shrines to the giants on whose shoulders we stand,” the new US president said. “Directly in front of me, the monument to a monumental man, George Washington, father of our country. A man of humility who came to greatness reluctantly. He led America out of revolutionary victory into infant nationhood. Off to one side, the stately memorial to Thomas Jefferson.”

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Come the Fourth of July, amid pageantry and fireworks, Washington and Jefferson will be lauded again for delivering independence from the British crown. Less will be said about the role of the men, women and children they enslaved in the US creation myth.

But a new public artwork in Philadelphia, the cradle of independence, aims to tell the world about Robert Hemmings, who was Jefferson’s 14-year-old enslaved valet who stayed with him in the city for about 100 days in 1776.

It was here, in the parlour of the home of Jacob and Maria Graf, that Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence. Hemmings would have been responsible for making sure that he could work undisturbed. The National Park Service website notes: “Hemmings would have helped Jefferson dress, provided tea or a light meal, and coordinated his barber’s visits. It’s likely that Hemmings slept in the garret, a habitable attic or storage space at the top of the house.”

The house was demolished in 1883, reconstructed by the National Park Service in 1975 and is now known as Declaration House, which opened with a block party this week. It will offer a valuable antidote to Jefferson hagiography by putting Hemmings at the centre of the narrative.

The Descendants of Monticello, a public artwork by Sonya Clark, fills the house’s windows with the blinking eyes of the descendants of Hemmings and other enslaved people at Jefferson’s Monticello estate in Virginia. Clark hopes the space will be reminiscent of a lighthouse with video screens projecting eyes to the world like beacons.

“This is saying: here’s this building built to mark where Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence and now it is filled with these inhabitants,” Clark, 57, says by phone from Amherst, Massachusetts. “Now, it’s full again, and their eyes are watchful of what we’re doing with the business of freedom and unfreedom.”

Her inspiration came from the knowledge that Hemmings would have been witnessing Jefferson’s strokes of genius – “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” – while aware that Jefferson was sexually exploiting his enslaved sister, Sally Hemings, at Monticello (Robert Hemmings spelled his name with two m’s, like some of his relatives).

Clark, who is African American, says: “I kept thinking about this boy, Robert Hemmings, being there, witnessing this man, understanding the relation that this man has with his sister, understanding the discrepancy of power and the freedoms that he has. I wanted to make a piece about that.”

The other artistic ingredient was the eyes. Clark had been struck by a recent public work featuring black-and-white posters forming a closeup of the eyes of Eric Garner, an African American man killed by police, created by a young French artist known as JR.

She explains: “Activists and protesters were holding this large banner of Eric Garner’s eyes as they were marching in the streets and that never left me. I was thinking about the power of bearing witness with woken eyes. I thought I’d love to get Robert Hemmings’s eyes somehow.”

There are no images of Hemmings, but she thought of his family line. “Robert Hemmings’s descendants will have his eyes in there somewhere. In the same way that you might have your great-uncle’s or great-grandmother’s eyes or hands or nose, the genetic stuff of him would be in his descendants.”

As she discussed the project with collaborator Paul Farber of Monument Lab, Clark decided to expand beyond the Hemmings line to all the descendants of Monticello. “Here’s Jefferson, writing about freedoms, and he enslaves over 600 people [at Monticello and elsewhere] in his lifetime. At any given time, 140 to 160 people are enslaved on that property and some of them are his actual family members.”

Clark and Farber went to Monticello, now a museum that has done much to confront Jefferson’s racist legacy and acknowledge that he fathered at least six children with Sally Hemings. They met its director and studied its archives.

Clark recalls: “I’m looking at people’s photo albums and all these documents and trying to capture the ones that would hold the eyes of these descendants. Living descendants came and we talked to them, told them what this project was and videotaped their eyes as well.

“There’s this beautiful moment where the living descendants are just looking in the camera, so it’s just one eye blinking and they can see themselves reflected in the camera lens. To each one of them, I said, you’re looking at your eye but in your own eye is all of your ancestors.

“For some of them, that ancestor might include Thomas Jefferson. I think of this piece as being a kind of haunting of the space but also and the inhabitance of this space and also a reclamation of this space. If we’re talking about freedom, whose freedom?”

The multichannel projection features eyes drawn from photos as well as closeups of the eyes of about 45 living descendants, made with the help of videographers from Ming Media. Monument Lab defines a monument as “a statement of power and presence in public”. Clark adds: “This project is to empower those descendants with their presence in public.

“The project is refusing this whitewashing of American history. The way that we’re taught about Jefferson, the founding father. He died in debt. He enslaved all of these people. Many years ago, when I was a kid in DC, if you went to Monticello then you would just think there’s this white guy who lives on all these acres of land and didn’t enslave anybody and lived in this nice house.”

History is once again fiercely contested as the US braces for a presidential election and, two years from now, its 250th birthday. It was no surprise when Nikole Hannah-Jones, a journalist who oversaw the 1619 Project for the New York Times, was met with a conservative backlash that included Donald Trump’s creation of a 1776 Commission to combat “leftwing indoctrination” in schools.

Clark says: “As the truth-telling is happening, the half-telling is becoming more fierce. Don’t tell the truth; ban books. The artist Mark Bradford was talking about white supremacy and he said it was complex but it was not complicated – I just love that. The systems of keeping the inequality in entrenched – those are complex, but that the systems are serving to do just that is not complicated.”

Truth-tellers such as Hannah-Jones destabilise narratives that so many have been told about what America is, she adds. “I didn’t make racism and yet somehow it often falls to those who have been under the thumb of oppression to call it out. And that makes sense because those who are the thumb are benefiting from it.”

• The Descendants of Monticello is on view at Declaration House in Philadelphia until 8 September