Another Artistic Interpretation of African American Activism

Thinking back to our in-class activity of depicting African American Activism throughout time, I kept thinking of modern pieces of African American art I’ve seen in museums, plays, movies, shows, and everything else. More specifically, I kept thinking of the piece of art placed at the entrance of the National Civil Rights museum downtown. For those of you who don’t remember or haven’t been, it’s a giant slab of metal that has this ambiguous form and shape. You walk around it, thinking about what it could be. You see these people, these humans, on the surface, struggling for life and breath, struggling to make it “up” this metal wall, but when you look up, there seems to be nothing of value at the top. You continue to circle it again and again (people start to stare at you). You catch glimpses of Dante’s Inferno. With the struggling human figures, you get the sense that they’re in this hellish place of punishment and strife. They struggle for room and light; they struggle with their families and their partners; they struggle for existence. Finally, you realize what the amorphous metal shape in the center of the room is. You realize that from all sides, it takes the basic form of the United States. You can now see the struggling forms throughout the South, the North, the East, and the West. Throughout the United States there were these struggling humans, trying to live and prosper but limited by the mere environment they inhabited. In this depiction of African American life, you get the sense of universal activism: this sense that mere actions of resistance were activisms, that mere actions of refusal to conform were activisms. In this scene, I wanted to share that we see yet another interpretation of activism, yet another depiction akin to our own, yet another viewpoint to form the multiplicitous environment of activisms that have formed and grow throughout African American Activism, in an environment that takes form in the very hardships detailed and portrayed by this artist’s creation.