A new sculpture park in the Alabama capital is designed to explore the institution of slavery as well as the lives and legacies of enslaved people.
Set on 17 wooded acres next to the Alabama River, the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park opened in Montgomery near the end of last month.
(Freedom Monument Sculpture Park in Montgomery, Alabama | Credit: Equal Justice Initiative / Human Pictures)
The project is the latest from the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a nonprofit founded by attorney and social justice advocate Bryan Stevenson.
The EJI has previously opened the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, dedicated to the victims of racial terror lynchings, and the Legacy Museum, where exhibits chronicle the slave trade, the Jim Crow era, and mass incarceration. Collectively, the three Montgomery venues are known as the Legacy Sites.
(Kehinde Wiley’s An Archaeology of Silence at the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park in Montgomery, Alabama | Credit: Equal Justice Initiative / Human Pictures)
The purpose of the sculpture park, according to an EJI press release, is to address the “absence of authentic, historically significant places in America” that respond to slavery and “to honor the millions of people who endured the brutality of slavery and created a more hopeful future for this country.”
Visitors to the park encounter artworks, historical artifacts, and written narratives recounting the story of slavery, starting with a short history of the region’s Indigenous inhabitants before moving into visual depictions, supported with text, of the transatlantic trade of African people and the subsequent lives of the enslaved—whose labor, resistance, faith, families, loves, and legacies remain firmly at the center of things at the site, according to the EJI.
(Freedom Monument Sculpture Park in Montgomery, Alabama | Credit: Equal Justice Initiative)
The sculptures include contributions by many big names in the contemporary art world—Theaster Gates, Simone Leigh, Alison Saar, and Kehinde Wiley among them.
Their work shares the grounds with significant historical objects such as a whipping post, chains, and 170-year-old dwellings where enslaved people lived on cotton plantations.
(Freedom Monument Sculpture Park in Montgomery, Alabama | Credit: Equal Justice Initiative / Human Pictures)
Visits to the park end at the site’s National Monument to Freedom, described by The New Yorker as a 43-feet-high, 150-feet-wide giant book, “propped wide open, and engraved on its surface [with] the names of more than a hundred and twenty thousand Black people, documented in the 1870 census, who were emancipated after the Civil War.”
One ticket covers admission to the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park and the EJI’s two other Legacy Sites (the museum and the lynching memorial), and the ticket costs just $5 per person. You don’t have to visit all three in one day, either; while admission to the museum is timed-entry, you can see the memorial and the sculpture park any day after buying your ticket.
(The Caring Hand by Eva Oertli and Beat Huber at the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park in Montgomery, Alabama | Credit: Equal Justice Initiative)
For more information about planning a visit, go to LegacySites.EJI.org.
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