Simone Leigh’s Brick House (2019), a 16-foot-tall bronze sculpture, beckons visitors toward the entrance of Freedom Monument Sculpture Park in Montgomery, Alabama.
The sculpture is a bust of a Black woman with high cheekbones, full lips, and no eyes. An afro and cornrows crown her head. The braids, adorned with cowrie shell beads, reach her shoulders. Her torso mimics a skirt and clay house.
It was the inaugural piece for Leigh’s Anatomy of Architecture series—a body of work incorporating architectural forms from West Africa and the Southern United States, combined with the design of the human body. Leigh, who describes her work as “auto-ethnographic,” was inspired by the Batammaliba architecture from Benin and Togo, the teleuk dwellings of the Mousgoum people of Cameroon and Chad, and the restaurant Mammy’s Cupboard in Natchez, Mississippi. The sculpture was first unveiled for the High Line Plinth, a site for public art in New York City. Surrounded by street signs and the sounds of traffic in a sprawling urban space, the statue was Leigh’s towering homage to the beauty and resilience of Black women.
Five years later, Brick House resides in a new home more than a thousand miles away, removed from the chaos of urban sprawl, initiating a wooded landscape along the Alabama River. Steeped in solemn history, the river was a central passage for human trafficking during the American slave trade and by the mid-1800s Montgomery was Alabama’s most prominent slave trading community. Now, a 17-acre sculpture walk sits near that same Alabama riverbank, weaving together a narrative of North American slavery with contemporary art, artifacts, recollections, and literature.
The Freedom Monument Sculpture Park is the third public space created by the Equal Justice Initiative. Founded by civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson, EJI is a nonprofit dedicated to examining and challenging the country’s history of racial violence, mass incarceration, and economic inequity. In 2018 EJI opened two sites in Montgomery: The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration and The National Memorial for Peace and Justice. The Legacy Museum uses a range of media to connect the timeline of the transatlantic slave trade to the modern-day prison system, while the memorial remembers victims of lynching and racial terror. This year, in the spring of 2024, EJI added the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park with hopes to bestow honor and intimacy to the already shakingly emotional experience.
After visiting the three sites, I spoke with Stevenson to learn more about his embrace of sculpture in this context of history and memorial. Here are five questions from that conversation.
The following conversation was edited for length and clarity:
Shauna: What was your goal with Freedom Monument Sculpture Park?
Bryan: I think some visual animation is required for people to be able to absorb the tragedy of slavery. The visual record of slavery is not very complete, and it’s not very honest because people didn’t have an interest in characterizing or representing that experience in a way that revealed the barbarity and the cruelty. Sculpture emerged as an important way to help people navigate this difficult and challenging history with images, with art, and with beauty that depicts the brutality of slavery, but also the humanity of those enslaved.
Shauna: To me sculpture is very immersive and emotive, and you’re talking about illustrating the horror of slavery—a history that doesn’t have a lot of visual documentation. Is that why you chose sculpture?
Bryan: Sculptures are powerful. They are in many ways larger than life, and I think this history looms over us in a way that’s larger than the facts that we read and the details that we’ve heard about that institution.
We’re fortunate to have some extremely talented Black sculptors that have been saying things about history and the Black experience across the globe that haven’t always been contextualized in major museums. I think their art takes on a different meaning when it’s in a narrative space focused on the Black experience. This wooded environment near a river in the shadow of tens of thousands of people who were enslaved, who were looking to the earth for relief and rejuvenation adds something to the story many of these artists are trying to tell.
Shauna: Let’s talk a little bit about Simone Leigh’s Brick House, because that’s the first thing that you see when you enter. I noticed the park doesn’t start with mourning and tragedy; the first pieces are very regal. It seems to celebrate Black excellence and Black beauty. They also include works that honor Indigenous Americans. Grouped together, the sculptures seem to illustrate how Black people in Africa and Indigenous people built thriving civilizations before Europeans came. What was your motivation for starting with these exalting pieces instead of with adversity?
Bryan: I think it’s important that we see the beauty, the boldness, the largeness of Black life before slavery, before Europeans. Simone Leigh takes the experience, the history, the nobility, the strength, the courage, the power, the capacity, the love of Black women, and represents that in something towering and plain and direct and honest. I think Brick House was a necessary way to start the experience. You don’t appreciate the harm and the tragedy of slavery if you don’t appreciate the beauty and the dignity and the power of those who, when free, represented something so important for the world.
And, of course, Indigenous peoples lived on these lands, on this riverbank, for centuries before Europeans arrived. It felt essential to make sure people understood that these lands were not only tied to the history of slavery in America, but also are sacred and consequential to the peoples who occupied them.
Shauna: On that note, I want to ask specifically about the Alabama River. When you’re walking through the park, it takes a turning point right after Wangechi Mutu’s In Two Canoe. That sculpture is the last time you see water as a peaceful life force. Thereafter you sort of transition into the racial terrorism that happened on the water, and that happens right when you have the clearest view of the river. Was that intentional?
Bryan: Very much, very much. I think that the river is beautiful. The river has life. The river sustained Indigenous cultures for centuries, and we need to acknowledge that. But the river also was a portal of terror and violence. It was a place of bondage and cruelty where horrible things happened to enslaved Black people. Seeing the river as a place of beauty and sustenance, but also of trauma and terror, is important.
You’re absolutely right that when you get past Wangechi’s sculpture, the river takes on a different aspect. Your relationship to it shifts, and that is the relationship that you carry as you walk past the holding pens and the whipping posts and the labor represented by the cotton field. It then shifts again toward the end where we begin to encounter the music, the coping, the resistance, the resilience of Black communities. So, yes, the river is a really central part of the experience.
Shauna: Can you talk about that transition a little bit, because you have words from Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, and then it transitions into works of resistance and rebellion.
Bryan: I think it’s important that we understand the violence that has shaped the Black experience—from the brutality and the lashings and the beatings and sexual violence that characterize slavery, to the era of lynching that followed slavery into the 20th century. We continue to struggle against that violence; that is a legacy of slavery. It’s important to represent that, and we have several pieces that do it brilliantly. Alison Saar’s Tree Souls speak to an eternal resistance to oppression and even death, with figures that rise from the ground, rooted to and growing from the soil. Daniel Popper’s torn bodies and Kehinde Wiley’s slumped, equestrian figure also dramatize the legacy of the violence through a lens that values perseverance.
The centerpiece of the park is our National Monument to Freedom where we celebrate those who were enslaved and their capacity to love in the midst of agony—their willingness to give life, to create life, despite the brutality of their day-to-day existence. That’s the remarkable, and I think the most significant, aspect of the history of slavery in America, and to appreciate that we have to be fully conscious of the death and the violence, the despair, the agony, the pain and suffering. Collectively the sculptures, and the entire experience of the three sites, allow you to appreciate how extraordinary it was that this community of people found a way to carry on, to create life, to love, and to share a future and a hope for generations to come.
Before reaching the National Monument to Freedom, the path brings you to an iteration of the sculpture 108 Death Masks by Nikesha Breeze. Breeze’s original work is a nod to the wax funeral masks created for deceased leaders and luminaries in Europe during the 1800s.
This version of her installation, commissioned for EJI, features 80 feet of bronze cast faces. Each is molded from clay and left to weather and crack before casting. The line of worn visages evokes the Middle Passage and the African people who were shackled and placed in ships like cargo—an association heightened by the fact that Breeze made many of the masks in Africa before they were symbolically (and practically) shipped to the United States.
Along the park’s final stretch, visitors reach the National Monument to Freedom, a 43 x 155-foot wall inscribed with 122,000 names chosen by newly emancipated Black people in the 1800s who were previously denied the honor of a surname. The sculpture wall, in the form of an open book, honors nearly five million formerly enslaved Black people and their tens of millions of descendants. It’s a solemn, yet striking way to honor the dead and a place for their spirits to rest with dignity.