Nov 8th 2025

Boz Deseo Garden: Harriet

@ Bodenrader

1620 West Carroll Avenue, Chicago, IL 60612

Opening Saturday, November 8th, from 6PM - 8PM

On view through Saturday, December 20th

Bodenrader is proud to announce Harriet, an exhibition by Boz Deseo Garden.⁠
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Please join us for an opening reception with the artist on Saturday, November 8th from 6-8pm.⁠
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A text by Tiernan Hart will accompany the exhibition. ⁠
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Boz Deseo Garden⁠
Harriet⁠
November 8 – December 20, 2025⁠
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In May of 1851, a legal injunction temporarily prevented Kentucky planter James Martin from selling his slave, Harriet. The injunction was filed by two other planters, Jesse Baker and G.W. Dozier. The case survives only as a single document in the Chicago History Museum’s archive from the Julius Frankel collection: a bond, scanned as two separate files of its recto and its verso. This bond is evidence of a court ruling that determined the injunction was wrongfully issued. Ergo, Baker and Dozier agreed to pay Martin $800 as compensation for the damages caused by the halted sale.⁠
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The exhibition, however, bypasses the legalities implied by the bond and turns to its archival digitization, to the moment where it was physically turned over to scan—and split into two files—both recto and verso. This mundane act is magnified and recast as the primal scene of an archival scopic drive: the unrelenting desire to see the object from all sides.⁠

Official Website

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