“To Make Us Free: Witnessing Activism at Whitman and Beyond” opened on Sept. 23 and will stay open until March 13, 2026. The exhibit includes 55 art pieces and objects with works from 16 artists and art groups, which are featured in both the Maxey Museum and Sheehan Gallery.

After visiting an exhibit featuring stories of incarcerated women through art in 2019, Director of the Maxey Museum, Libby Miller, and Director of the Sheehan Gallery, Kynde Kiefel, felt inspired to visualize student activism at Whitman through an artistic exhibit of their own. 

“The hope is to look deep into wherever you stand, whatever that history is,” Kiefel said. “And just hopefully to inspire people to make their own change and make their own artwork that might speak to the causes they believe in.”

The exhibit features a wishing well in the center of the gallery, so visitors can have a space to contemplate national and global conflicts and then write or speak their thoughts into the well.

On the wall of the outer circle, curators compiled a timeline of Whitman student protests involving economic justice, disability justice, women’s rights, racial justice, free speech and student rights, environmental justice, LGBTQIA+ rights and peace movements. Outside the inner circle, visitors interact with sculptures, neon signs and paintings which represent global protest movements. 

“We wanted the timeline to be a circle because activism is inherently cyclical,” Kiefel said. “So that was aesthetically necessary. [It] marks days but it’s not linear and it’s never really done. We wanted that circle to sort of keep you going within that story and see how it all connected.”

The six-year project allowed for Kiefel and Miller to ensure the quality of information and artwork they presented was clear and vibrant for their audience, which meant dividing up parts of the building process to other faculty. Exhibitions and Collections Manager, Andrew Somoskey, worked on the inner circle and booth, while Tara Graves, the Gallery Assistant, crafted signage, framing and miscellaneous work for the exhibition.

“While we’re a tiny crew that gets to visualize, we have all these incredible people around us that are willing to put their energy into this too,” Kiefel said. “It’s just such a constellation of effort and that whole sky of people is what can make [the stories] felt and heard.”

While Kiefel mainly focused on obtaining the artwork for the exhibit, Miller researched student activism and protest materials. Miller worked with the Whitman College and Northwest Archives to find documents from newspapers like Walla Walla Union Bulletin, The Pioneer and scrapbooks and photos from local activist movements to situate them with national events at the time. In the fall of 2024, Miller also hired five research assistants to expedite her process and hired two more over the summer of 2025. 

“It has a really good message for Whitman students to keep being active within the times that we are currently in,” summer student researcher Pendhay Yeshay said. 

To kick off the exhibit opening, the Maxey Museum and Sheehan Gallery hosted a community reading and storytelling event. Speakers consisted of Whitman students and staff, as well as professors at Walla Walla Community College and members of the Walla Walla community. 

“We thought of it as a storytelling event with multiple voices, multiple perspectives,” Miller said. “It’s nice to deliver information and ideas in different ways and then to gather together to think about this really important question and be in the same space.”

The exhibition will also host a sing-along on Nov. 14 at 6 p.m. in Chism Music Hall to spread protest and their message in a creative way. There will be a workshop on Nov. 4 and Nov. 6 to practice for the event for anyone who would like to participate in the sing-along. 

“We just felt like a protest sing-along would be a healing feeling in these times,” Kiefel said.

The exhibition will end in March to prepare the Sheehan Gallery for senior art theses in the late spring. However, Miller and Kiefel plan to publish a digital version of the exhibit when the in-person space closes for new expositions. 

The directors hope that the exhibit and ongoing online project will memorialize the legacy of student protest at Whitman College. Through a variety of artists, the project will chronicle local, national and international protest movements online, so even when the in-person exhibition closes in the spring, people will still be able to look back at it and have the space to know and witness the storied history of dissent.