The Galleries at Moore
Pat Ward Williams Virtual Tour:
 32 Hours in a Box . . . Still Counting
1987
cyanotype prints in windowframe, Xerox, wood pillars, text, 96" x 96" x 96"
Sibling RivalryMOVE?Virtual TourGalleries Directory Text from A Narrative Chronology by Moira Roth
Italicized text by Pat Ward Williams
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32 Hours in a Box . . . Still Counting In the initial version, the work is composed of a series of cyanotype photographs of a crouching black man, installed in windowframes. The five windowframes form a box. For the “Art Scape” exhibition in 1988, Williams added barbed wire and pillars with black-and-white photographs attached to them. For the traveling exhibition, “Black Photographers Bear Witness: 100 Years of Social Protest,” the barbed wire was removed for reasons of safety.

We as black people have to find different solutions to overcome political and personal obstacles. This is a piece about Henry “Box” Brown and problem-solving. Henry Brown was a slave who had himself nailed in a box and mailed to freedom in Philadelphia. I thought this was an extraordinarily inventive solution to a problem. When he arrived in Philadelphia he got out of the box and became known as Henry “Box” Brown. This makes this man my hero. I like to think of this piece as a kind of heroic sculpture, maybe even a monument [1989].