York College Arts Gallery

Opened in 1989, the Gallery presents several professional exhibitions each year, ranging from solo and thematic group exhibitions to student shows at the close of each semester.

Exhibition Statement

Freedom’s Battle is an exhibition presented by Self-Evident Education in partnership with York College. It is designed as an interdisciplinary learning space that bridges visual art, film, and historical inquiry. Drawing from Self-Evident Education’s multimedia projects, the exhibition uses creative practice as a pedagogical tool—using film, visual art, sound, and archival materials to critically examine the histories and enduring legacies of systemic racism in the United States. Grounded in historical inquiry and creative practice, the exhibition invites audiences to consider how the past shapes the present—and how a deeper understanding of history can inform the work of building a more just future.

Self-Evident Education is an educational non-profit that creates multimedia curriculum materials and curates learning experiences to support educators to teach authentically on the challenging and essential histories and legacies of systemic racism in America.

Featuring artwork by Derrick Dent, behind-the-scenes film materials, excerpts of documentary films, and Got the Power: Cotton and Sugar Boomboxes by Bayeté Ross Smith, the exhibition foregrounds process, context, and inquiry. Storyboards, sound, and moving image installations offer insight into how historical research, artistic collaboration, and storytelling intersect to produce meaning.

Conceived as an active site of learning, the exhibition encourages dialogue across disciplines and supports classroom engagement, facilitated screenings, and public conversation. By situating art-making within broader social and historical frameworks, the exhibition invites the campus community to reflect on the role of education and storytelling in understanding the past and shaping more just futures.

Artist Biographies

Michael Lawrence-Riddell (he/him) 

As founder and executive director of Self-Evident Education, Michael combines his decades of expertise as an educator with his belief in the power of storytelling to fully address complex and difficult histories. When he could not find engaging and accessible resources that critically examined the histories and legacies of systemic racism in the United States, he set out to create them with a team of brilliant and trusted collaborators. Founded in 2019, SEE is a non-profit dedicated to helping educators and communities to honestly and rigorously understand the histories and legacies of systemic racism. 

Michael was inspired, in part, by his scholarship as an African-American Studies major at Wesleyan University, and the failures of our nation to truly reckon with the racial inequities present in history and our contemporary society. 

Michael holds a Masters of Arts in Teacher Leadership from Mount Holyoke College and is an award winning educator, with two decades in public  school classrooms. He has guest lecturered in the Department of Education at Westfield State University.

Derrick Dent (they/them)

Derrick Dent is a freelance illustrator and graphic recorder based in Brooklyn, NY. They have taught college level drawing and visual narrative courses. Additionally, they have illustrated for Wired, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Times, The Oxford American, and many other publications. 

Their brush and ink illustrations have the technical edge of careful paintings and the caricatural verve of comics. Their distinctive comics style takes its cues from the American graphic underground but deals with text and pacing in a way reminiscent of classic Japanese Manga. Derrick was born and raised in Memphis, TN.

Bayeté Ross Smith (he/him)

Bayeté Ross Smith is a multidisciplinary artist, visual journalist, filmmaker and educator.

He’s created projects for the Apollo Theater, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, The Laundromat Project, the NYC Parks Department, the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, the California Judicial Council and during the Paris Photo Festival. He is Columbia Law School’s inaugural Artist-In-Residence, a Presidential Leadership Scholar, a TED Speaker, a Creative Capital Awardee, a CatchLight Global Fellow, an Art For Justice Fund Grantee Partner and a BPMPlus Grantee.

His projects have been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic Learning, PBS, Facing History & Ourselves, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Charlotte Observer and the Columbia Law School Scholarship Archive, in addition to books such as Dis:Integration: The Splintering of Black America (2010), Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present (2009) and Reflections In Black: A Reframing (2025).

His work is in the collections of The Smithsonian Institution, the Oakland Museum of California, the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and The Brooklyn Museum.