Nobody Knows the Trouble I See, from Walk Together Children: Black American Spirituals

Inscriptions

Numbered, in graphite, lower left margin: A/P; titled, in graphite, lower center margin: Nobody Knows the Trouble I See; signed, in graphite, lower right margin: ABryan

Label

Crammed in the hold of a slave ship for months, these three people evoke the anger, worry, sadness, fatigue, and fear of people ripped from their homeland and sold into slavery. Using the Middle Passage, slave traders brought roughly fifteen million enslaved Africans to the Americas against their will. Ashley Bryan paired this sobering image with the spiritual “Nobody Knows the Trouble I See.” Created by enslaved African Americans, spirituals brought Christian themes to African rhythms, preserving musical traditions from the continent, allowing enslaved people to communicate without their enslavers’ knowledge, and providing strength and hope amid slavery’s intense dehumanization.

From the 2026 exhibition Inhabiting Historical Time: Slavery and Its Afterlives, curated by Amelia Kahl (Barbara C. & Harvey P. Hood 1918 Senior Curator of Academic Programming) and Alisa Swindell (Associate Curator of Photography)

Course History

WRIT 5, Expository Writing, William Craig, Winter 2014

AAAS 88.19, Contemporary African-American Artists, Michael Chaney, Summer 2021

Writing 5.20, Foundations at Dartmouth, Doug Moody, Fall 2024

Writing 5.23, Foundations of Dartmouth: Samson Occom, Edward Mitchell, and the History and Cultures of Native American, African American, and “Minority” Students at Dartmouth College, Doug Moody, Winter 2025

Exhibition History

In Residence: Contemporary Art at Dartmouth, Churchill P. Lathrop Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, January 18-July 6, 2014.

Inhabiting Historical Time: Slavery and Its Afterlives, Jaffe and Hall Galleries, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, December 20, 2025 - July 11, 2026.

Publication History

Walk Together Children: Black American Spirituals, New York: Atheneum Press, 1974, page 44.

Michael R. Taylor and Gerald Auten, In Residence: Contemporary Artists at Dartmouth, Hanover, New Hampshire: Trustees of Dartmouth College, 2013, ill. p. 62, no. 47

Provenance

Warm Springs Gallery, Charlottesville, Virginia; sold to present collection, 2013.

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Subjects