Blank Slate Monument

The blank slate is the point. Over the summer of 2021, thousands of people connected to the monument's WiFi network and typed what they wanted the world to see. Some names. Some demands. Some grief. Some rage. Some hope.

Four stacked figures span four centuries of the African American experience. At the base, a slave ancestor — hands and feet bound, face pressed to the ground, yet struggling to support those above him. On his back, a lynched Union soldier martyr with a noose around his neck, still fighting to hold the American flag aloft while carrying a memory jug — an African folk-art vessel that memorializes the dead. Above him, a mother activist who must both mend broken men and raise the next generation, a baby pressed against her back. At the top, the figure stands upright with a lantern and the blank placard — the voice of the people, left blank because no monumental few words from one artist could express the thoughts and emotions of millions.

Every figure is cast in bronze by Ghanaian sculptor Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, whose outdoor installation "Nkyinkyim" — dedicated to the memory of victims of the Transatlantic slave trade — is on permanent display at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.

The monument launched May 25, 2021 — the anniversary of George Floyd's murder — at the Kentucky Center for African American Heritage in Louisville. Over two years, it traveled to the DuSable Museum in Chicago (Juneteenth 2021), Lyles Station in Princeton, the Motown Museum in Detroit, Times Square, The Africa Center in Harlem, We Act Radio in Washington D.C., the August Wilson Center in Pittsburgh, the Harvey B. Gantt Center in Charlotte, the Civil Rights Memorial Center in Montgomery (a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center), the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Rice University in Houston, and the Rosenberg Library in Galveston — where its final day, July 5th, honored Frederick Douglass's speech "What to the Slave is the 4th of July?"

The engineering problem: a multi-ton bronze sculpture that needs to travel between cities on a flatbed truck, stand upright at each stop without a crane, and power an interactive digital sign off-grid. The solution: a custom steel platform with a hidden hydraulic lift system, solar panels, and a battery bank.