Negative liberty/ Positive liberty

To coerce someone is to deprive them of freedom.

Negative Liberty / Positive Liberty interrogates the contested meanings of freedom in America. Drawing on political philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between “freedom from” and “freedom to,” the work examines how liberty has been invoked to both expand and restrict rights, to empower and to exclude.

The work is also informed by Anthony Barboza’s 1966 photograph, Pensacola, FL, depicting a neon sign once meant to spell “LIBERTY.” The “E” is missing, the “R” hangs at an angle. But what if the sign isn’t broken — what if it was never completed?

The piece unfolds one audience member at a time. Each receives a distillation of Berlin’s ideas, an invitation to consider what forces shape their choices, and is then asked to embody that reflection through karaoke — lending their actual voice to an artificial frame. When the song concludes, the space fractures: images of political violence erupt, a visceral reminder of how distorted notions of liberty can slip from rhetoric into rage, coercion, and violence.

In less than ten minutes, Negative Liberty / Positive Liberty turns philosophy into lived encounter — situating freedom not as abstraction, but as precarious, unfinished, and contested.

Artist statement

Negative Liberty / Positive Liberty was created in response to the rise of politically motivated violence in America, where liberty is too often claimed in the same breath as it is denied. Berlin cautioned that “to coerce someone is to deprive them of freedom” — a truth made visible on January 6, when followers of a political movement, coerced by rhetoric disguised as liberty, were driven into violent action.

At the american vicarious, we are compelled by moments when language fractures and ideals collapse into contradiction — when words like “freedom” are emptied of meaning, or weaponized against the very people they are meant to protect. This work emerges from the urgency of that contradiction. It is an attempt to hold a mirror to a nation in which liberty has become both rallying cry and instrument of repression, and to ask what it will take to reclaim freedom as a shared, unfinished pursuit rather than a tool of coercion.

Press Quotes

• “Viscerally theatrical, establishing a claustrophobic, strikingly-lit environment that’s jarringly disorienting and immersive.” - Viewpoints