Consider for a moment, if Harriet Tubman, the abolitionist who led dozens of slaves to freedom, were a gun-wielding, take-no-prisoners, doo rag-sporting movie star. What if folks called her Dirrrty Harriet?

It's a vexing question that looms and dares, and maybe even winks throughout a provocative new art exhibition that aims to expand our understanding of social and racial history.

Freedom Fighters: American Legends Re-Imagined at Miami Beach's ArtCenter/South Florida features mock movie posters by 12 graphic artists who have melded the images of iconic 19th and 20th century African Americans with the saucy language and sensibilities of Blaxploitation films of the 1970s.

''You are talking about ideas that are blended in what is, perhaps, an uncomfortable way,'' says Jacquenette Arnette, the center's director of exhibitions. ``Viewers are challenged to take what they know and reconcile it with what they think they know.''

At this strange intersection of history and pop culture, the heroes and heroines who courageously forged black America are interpreted perhaps like never before. Nat Turner, who led a storied slave rebellion in 1831, clobbers ''the white man'' as Black Belt Kill Master Jones in a poster by Detekh of Minneapolis. Abolitionist John Brown bursts from Duane Smith's poster as Blood Brother, draped in a fat gold chain and armed with a knife and brass knuckles. Madam C.J. Walker, considered the first black female millionaire, re-emerges in Shalette Cauley-Wandrick's imagination as ''a new godmother in town.'' Sojourner Truth, abolitionist and women's activist, battled oppression and inequality starting in the 1840s. Her tagline on Christopher Harrison's design: Truth's her name. JUSTICE is her game!

All of a sudden, history doesn't seem so distant.

''We wanted this to be an exhibit that people could dig at and hit something they disagreed with or they liked,'' says Roderic Southall, who curated the show here and a similar exhibit in Minneapolis in 2006. ``Sometimes we make our icons less human and immobile. This allows us to look at them in a different way.''

By transporting the legends from their traditional settings, the show offers a subtext that challenges myths and fixed, often idealized notions of history and blackness.

Imbued with humor, satire and irony, the posters explore the power of the Blaxploitation genre, born a few years after the civil rights movement. In less than a decade, it produced almost 50 low-budget films and a fistful of brazen archetypes. The movies -- Shaft, Super Fly, Cleopatra Jones, and Coffy -- and similar cult favorites, featured black pimps, pushers, prostitutes, and detectives, some of whom battled the corrupt establishment. They also remade movie classics as Blacula, Black Shampoo, Blackenstein.

They were simultaneously brilliantly empowering and ignominious but so rooted in the worst racial stereotypes that the genre faded by the late '70s. Still, over time, some critics have argued that the films were a complex, even excusable, reaction to the state of black America.

''Blaxploitation films are in keeping with the black tradition of drawing empowerment from something demeaning,'' says Arnette, who helped curate the exhibition. 'We took black face and shuckin' and jivin' and made it our own.''

The exhibit was conceived in 2005 by Rush Art Gallery in New York, a nonprofit space committed to exposing urban youth to the arts and giving emerging artists a platform. The poster medium was chosen for its accessibility and power to canonize a message.

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