Cargo

Cargo depicts a decisive moment in the 1849 escape of Henry "Box" Brown (1816–1897) from enslavement in Virginia by mailing himself in a wooden crate to abolitionists in Philadelphia via the United States Postal Service. Settling into the box (depicted with collaged newsprint) Henry Brown locks eyes with a kneeling James C.A. Smith, the free Black man who aided his flight. One of Brown’s hands rests on his top hat, a foreshadowing symbol of his later career touring England as a magician and showman. During these performances, he presented an anti-slavery panorama—a canvas scroll that unrolled to depict scenes of his experience and escape. Brown’s inventiveness in shipping himself as cargo illustrates the notion of commoditizing one’s own body that is central to Fordjour’s practice and investment in figuration. The exuberant visual materiality of Fordjour’s painting is the result of a painstaking collage process in which tiles of corrugated cardboard are affixed to the canvas in a grid and selectively covered with newspaper, punched paper dots, and foil. Gaps in the grid serve as channels into which the artist makes pockmarks and excavations to reveal richly chromatic substrata.