In this review of the Norman Rockwell Museum's "Imagining Freedom" exhibition, Pops Peterson's gallery is featured on four pages, p11-p13, excerpted below.
​Click here for a pdf of the complete feature.
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Pops Peterson's "Thanksgiving Gay Dinner" from 2014. Pops Peterson/Courtesy Norman Rockwell Museum
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... Closing the circle, the museum includes several works by an artist of these times, Pops Peterson, who takes over most of a gallery with vivid digital photo-collage updates on Rockwell’s images: “Freedom from What?” the placid bedtime ritual of a white family from “Freedom from Fear” replaced by a Black family, dad looking anxiously over his shoulder; and “Thanksgiving Gay Dinner,” a gleeful take on “Freedom from Want,” hosted by an interracial same-sex couple.
Peterson picks up where Rockwell left off: An American ideal, made for right now. But Peterson’s ideals aren’t universal or shared, and that’s the problem. Freedom was never as simple as the “Four Freedoms” suggested. But has it ever been more complicated? At its heart, “Imagining Freedom” addresses its own shortcomings and makes space for a wide band of liberty, in the broadest terms. As we hurtle toward Nov. 3 and beyond, it’s fair to wonder how much longer we, as a nation, will be able to say the same, and if we ever really could.
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At the Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, through Jan. 20, 2021. 413-298- 4100, www.nrm.org
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Pops Peterson's "Freedom from What?" from 2015. Pops Peterson/Courtesy Norman Rockwell Museum