Joe Minter : to You Through Me

"In the summer of 1989, Joe Minter had a vision from God to create art that would honor the shared experiences of African Americans in this country. Of more local concern, he had also heard that the city of Birmingham was planning to build a civil rights museum and worried that the "foot soldiers" would be left out of the official narrative. As a direct response, Minter began building a sprawling collection of sculpture and installations on land adjacent to both his home and the Shadow Lawn Memorial Gardens, a historically black cemetery, in the Woodland Park neighborhood of Birmingham. The result is a continuously evolving art environment that recounts both immediately local and world events that have affected humanity, with a focus on the contributions and tribulations of African Americans. The African Village is completely constructed from materials that have been discarded, a direct symbolic gesture reflecting the artist's belief that African-Americans have themselves been discarded throughout American history. In Minter's words, "The whole idea handed down to me by God is to use that which has been discarded, just as we as a people have been discarded made invisible. That what