Amos Eno Gallery - “A Long Train: 250 Years of Hypocrisy” Online Exhibition

The Declaration of Independence claimed “a long train of abuses and usurpations,” which its authors enumerated as grievances against their colonial overlord. 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of this Declaration. This exhibition does not commemorate independence as a completed achievement. Instead, it interrogates the Declaration as a historical document of selective freedom—one that promised liberty while authorizing dispossession, slavery, and exclusion. The Declaration proclaims universal ideals while emerging from—and helping to entrench—systems of slavery, settler colonialism, racial hierarchy, and gendered exclusion. Its language condemns “abuses and usurpations” even as it legitimizes the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, the enslavement of Africans, and the political erasure of women.

“A Long Train: 250 Years of Hypocrisy” asks who was included, who was erased, and what freedoms remain incomplete; and explores how colonial language, property, and sovereignty shaped—and continue to shape—systems of value, belonging, and authority. Rather than treating the Declaration as a fixed…