A freshly painted mural of Underground Railroad icon Harriet Tubman extending her hand is provoking viewers to reach out and grasp it.
A young African-American girl touching Tubman’s open hand was captured in a viral photo on Instagram, and it communicated everything the artist said he hoped for.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if I exposed the [Harriet Tubman Museum], I exposed the possibility of what’s inside, the information, the knowledge, the stories,” Michael Rosato, the painter of the mural, said in an interview with The Daily Signal.
Commissioned by the Dorchester Center for the Arts, Rosato, 59, was challenged to sum up Tubman’s legacy in one image for the Harriet Tubman Museum and Educational Center in Cambridge, Maryland. He finished the two-month project May 20 on one of the museum’s exterior walls.
Tubman was a 19th-century abolitionist who fled from a plantation in Cambridge and settled in Philadelphia. She returned to Maryland the following year to help her family escape from slavery and continued returning to help guide hundreds of slaves to freedom as the “conductor” of the Underground Railroad, a network of secret routes and safe houses planted by abolitionists to aid runaway slaves into the North and Canada.
Read the full story from The Daily Signal
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