Resting on the Goalpost. Washington, D.C., June 1969, from the series Southern Roads/City Pavements

Freeman has been on the streets since he was an eight-year-old who skipped school to ride the Baltimore trolleys. He worked with the arabbers, vendors who peddled ice, coal, and fresh produce from horse-drawn wagons, sold newspapers door-to-door, and joined a street gang. Concerned that back-alley life would lead to trouble, his mother sent him to live on a tobacco farm in southern Maryland. These experiences, and the people, he met, shaped the work of a man who in 2007 was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship and the Bess Lomax Hawes Award for a lifetime of artistic excellence and contributions to the nation’s traditional arts heritage.

African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era, and Beyond, 2012