Stephen Towns: Declaration & Resistance, an exhibition organized and toured by the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, examines the American dream through the lives of Black Americans from the late 18th century to the present time. Using labor as a backdrop, Stephen Towns highlights the role African Americans have played in shaping the economy, and explores their resilience, resistance, and endurance that have challenged the United States to truly embrace the tenets of its Declaration of Independence.
For this exhibition, Towns created a body of 35 newly created works including 27 figurative paintings and eight story quilts that along with existing work expand the historical narratives of enslaved and free people who toiled under the most extreme hardships yet persevered through acts of rebellion, skillful guile and self-willed determination. The exhibition will be grounded with several existing works including his installation quilt, Birth of a Nation, 2014, to provide the foundation for the creation of Town’s new series of quilts that give voice to textile, culinary and agricultural workers.
For the special series entitled The Coal Miners, six distinctive mixed-media paintings, feature Black miners of West Virginia who were relegated to the most difficult, underpaid, most dangerous and insecure jobs. Towns also foregrounds the stories of Black military workers, often frontline service people, who put their country first, which is the ultimate form of patriotism.  A few works in the exhibition shine light on the history of convict leasing (commonly known as chain gangs) by the criminal justice system in which the Black community was made to serve the economic interests of white southern elites via forced labor.
Towns calls attention to the hidden figures who helped shape American cuisine. Among these works the artist honors Ms. Elsie Henderson, who recently passed away at the incredible age of 107. Over the course of her life, Ms. Henderson used her culinary skills to nourish the appetites of several wealthy Pittsburgh families including the Kaufmans, owners of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Fallingwater in Mill Run, PA. Towns participated in an artist residency program at Fallingwater in June 2021 where he created new fiber works.
Lastly, Towns pays tribute to Ona Judge, a formerly enslaved servant and escapee from President George Washington’s plantation. Judge was an invaluable seamstress and body servant to Martha Washington, who as a teenager escaped Mount Vernon and fled to New England.
Stephen Towns was born in 1980 in Lincolnville, South Carolina, and received a Bachelor of Fine Art in painting from the University of South Carolina. His work has been exhibited locally and nationally, including solo exhibitions at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, York College, Goucher College, Galerie Myrtis, as well as group exhibitions at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Jack Shainman Gallery: The School, August Wilson Cultural Center, Arlington Art Center, Montpelier Arts Center, Star-Spangled Banner Flag House and Museum. His work has been featured in publications such as the New York Times, Cultured Magazine, ARTnews, American Craft Council Magazine, and The Baltimore Sun. Towns was honored as the inaugural recipient of the 2016 Municipal Art Society of Baltimore Travel Prize and received a Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance Rubys Artist Grant in 2015. In 2018, Towns was a semi-finalist for Sondheim Artscape Prize and awarded a MD State Arts Council’s Individual Artist Award.
Towns’s work is in the collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C., The Huntington Museum of Art, Huntington, West Virginia, The Rockwell Museum, Corning, New York, The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD, The Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg, PA, The Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African-American Art, Asbury, New Jersey, The City of Charleston, South Carolina, The Nelson Atkins Museum, St. Louis, Missouri, the private collection of Art + Practice, artist Mark Bradford’s nonprofit based in Leimert Park, Los Angeles, as well as other private collections nationally and abroad.
An Inside Look at Stephen Towns: Declaration & Resistance
