The Resurrection of Mark, Phillis, & Phebe, 2024

TBD Materials 

Monumentalizing Black resistance by honoring enslaved ancestors Mark, Phillis, and Phebe.

Mark, Phillis, and Phebe were enslaved African Americans in Charlestown during the colonial period of the 18th century United States. In the year 1755 they conspired to poison their owner, Captain John Codman, in the hopes of escaping violence and familial separation and were discovered by local authorities. Mark was hanged, his body put on display in an iron cage called a gibbet near Charlestown Common, present-day Somerville, for 20 years. Phillis was burned at the stake. Phebe was said to have been shipped to work in the fields of the West Indies.

The Resurrection of Mark, Phillis, & Phebe is a sculptural installation inspired by their story. It builds upon artist Ifé Franklin’s decade-long “Indigo Project,” which honors the lives, histories, cultures, and traditions of African people throughout the diaspora with a concentration on the formerly enslaved of North America. The Resurrection reimagines the gibbet, Mark’s final resting place, as a floating cocoon wrapped in Nigerian adire, indigo dyed textiles created using a variety of resist-dye techniques. The jug-like form also alludes to blue bottle trees from the American South, often found near homes and gardens for protection, good luck, and serving as a place for spirits to come into. Similarly, The Resurrection is Franklin’s way of creating a respectful and dignified place of rest for the spirits of Mark, Phillis, and Phebe. The anchoring form for the cocoon creates a circular imprint on the ground conjuring the Kongo cosmogram, a core symbol in the African Bakongo religion that represents the boundary between the physical world and spiritual world as well as the cycles of birth, life, death, and rebirth. Across the colonies numerous Kongo cosmograms, traditionally called dikenga, have been found near plantation cabins and under ceramic colonoware. The symbol was a way that enslaved Africans established and brought their culture to America.

By quilting together Yoruba adire onto a vessel from Black Southern origin floating over a Congolese dikenga, Franklin’s sculpture can be seen as a representation of the diversity and cultural resilience of the African diaspora. The Resurrection of Mark, Phillis, & Phebe transforms a story marred by violence, far too common in our nation’s historical landscape, into one that honors a legacy of resistance among local ancestors.