Brandywine Workshop’s exhibit ‘Harm Reduction’ looks at how artists have examined violence and trauma across decades and continents

An exhibit at the Brandywine Workshop and Archives takes an intimate look at the toll of violence on communities and the importance of harm reduction.

The artwork, part of the exhibit titled “Harm Reduction: Art in Response to Trauma,” tackles a wide range of issues, from gentrification and displacement to the experiences of those who were enslaved and who were targeted during the Holocaust. The exhibit, at 730 S. Broad St. in Southwest Center City, runs through Sept. 22.

In one piece, Look Down on War, artist Maya Freelon depicts a Black soldier who looks down to button his uniform jacket while an outburst of colors explodes behind him, simulating the violence of war.

The soldier: Allan Randall Freelon Sr., Maya’s great-grandfather.

Allan Freelon, who was born in Philadelphia and served in World War I between 1917 and 1919, came home traumatized by the war. He returned to the city to continue his studies in art, which helped him heal. His work was later celebrated during the Harlem Renaissance.

“Creating art was part of his therapy,” said Allan Edmunds, founder of the Brandywine Workshop and Archives.

Edmunds created a lithograph of Maya Freelon’s photograph of her great-grandfather. She then used tissue paper stained with different colors to create the explosion of orange, purple, teal, and brown colors behind the soldier.

“The burst of colors represents a lot of things, the explosion of bombs, and the explosions of emotions,” Edmunds said. “There are times when you seek darkness, and you see light and color exploding around you.”

Maya Freelon is one of 19 artists whose 27 prints in the exhibit are from the workshop’s collections.

The harm reduction theme came to Jessica Hamman, Brandywine’s curatorial assistant and collections manager, as she began planning for a new exhibit earlier this year.

She considered how people were still struggling with the psychological and physical effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and she believed the pandemic unleashed a fury of violence in her Overbrook neighborhood.

Last September, a man was shot and killed as he carried grocery bags home.

There were also two separate shootings near Overbrook High School within just a few months. Last November, four students were injured in an after-school shooting. And earlier this year, there was another shooting of a student as he walked to the school one morning.

One night, about 10, Hamman was looking out her windows and saw kids with a gun, shooting into the sky.

“They were laughing. It disturbed me. They were shooting straight up, but l was aware that the bullets come down,” she said. “More than anything, I was worried.”

Hamman took all the turmoil she was seeing and planned to put together an exhibit that focused on what harm does to the human body.

“I wanted to show how artists depicted bodies under trauma, how bodies become distorted,” she said.

Rather than showing actual bodies, the works look at how people respond to trauma, whether from racism, sexism, homophobia, violence, war, or anti-Semitism. Conversations she had with Edmunds led them to the “harm reduction” theme.

“Harm reduction” focuses on the needs of individuals and communities by providing relief and dignity to those in need, says the exhibit catalog, the introduction of which Hamman co-wrote with her wife, Alexa Vallejo.

“We see the significance of the show as a way to cultivate empathy among viewers as opposed to trying to highlight specific trauma experiences,” Hamman said.

One of the works on exhibit is And Then ... You Just Smile, by Philadelphia artist Moe Brooker.

Although the piece is not directly about violence, Hamman said she included it because of a statement Brooker once made about living in a dangerous neighborhood: “Artwork allowed me to say a lot about the world around me in a safe way.”

Other works include Untitled (The Dressing Table) by Chicana artist Patssi Valdez. Hamman said Valdez uses Mexican American imagery to give women “sanctuary in a patriarchal world.”

There is the collage-like offset lithograph Family Pictures by Tomie Arai, who used photos from the archives of the Museum of Chinese in America to assemble an imagined family album. In the catalog, Arai said she uses her art “to thwart the distillation of Asians and Asian Americans into a ‘monolithic yellow race.’”

Paul Keene’s Generations, which shows images of Black people in what appear to be apartment windows with a sign at the bottom saying “Final Notice,” suggests concerns about gentrification and displacement. There are two prints by John T. Scott: Blues for the Middle Passage I, about the trauma of being warehoused on ships for the enslaved, and I Remember Birmingham, about the 1963 church bombing that killed four Black girls.

And tucked away in a corner of the gallery because of the violence of the images are four prints from a 10-piece portfolio on the Holocaust by Murray Zimiles.

The exhibit is “extremely timely, if you want to draw a parallel between this exhibit [on trauma] and what happened” in Southwest Philadelphia, said Edmunds, referring to the shooting in early July that killed five people and injured two children.

On June 30, the Friday before that shooting, BWA hosted a panel discussion with two guest speakers who talked about how they used art in their work with the community.

The panel discussion can be seen below:

If you go, the exhibit is at the Brandywine Workshop and Archives, 730 S. Broad St., Philadelphia, Pa., 19146. Admission is free, but call to make a reservation a 267-831-2928. For more, visit https://brandywineworkshopandarchives.org/.