The public is now finally able to see “Africa Rising,” New York City’s only slavery memorial and one of its vanishingly few public monuments created by a Black woman. It’s just that this public will be in Paris, not New York.
The 17-foot-tall bronze sculpture by Barbara Chase-Riboud was commissioned in 1996 to mark the African Burial Ground in downtown Manhattan. Perhaps as many as 20,000 people, most enslaved, were buried there in what was then wasteland. When the city expanded in the late 18th century, the African Burial Ground was built over and forgotten until excavations for the Foley Square Federal Building (also known as the Ted Weiss Federal Building) in 1991 revealed human remains and plain wooden coffins.
These remains were eventually reinterred in the African Burial Ground National Monument, which neighbors the office building on 290 Broadway. As Chase-Riboud recalls in her 2023 memoir, she saw the commission as an opportunity to show that “the presence of Blackness in American history was fundamental.” She wanted to remind New Yorkers of what they had forgotten along with the existence of the burial ground itself: the crucial importance of enslaved labor to the foundation and wealth of the city.
New York City’s investors profited from building, equipping, and insuring slave ships through the 1860s, when two out of every three such voyages embarked from our harbor. Investors also made money on the New York Cotton Exchange, which was founded by Lehman Brothers in 1870 to capitalize on the labor of enslaved Southerners. This wealth, which continues to course through our city, is still so unequally distributed that around 9% of Black New Yorkers, citing the rising cost of raising a family, have moved away since the year 2000.
For “Africa Rising,” Chase-Riboud sculpted a woman who balances on a curved base as if it were the prow of a ship sailing along the Middle Passage. The figure has two faces. One, wrenched in agony, faces towards the home she is leaving. The other, stoically calm, looks west towards her future. The figure both mourns what she has lost and looks bravely forward to what she might make of this tragedy. Some of the fruits of her suffering are on the monument’s base, in the form of portrait medallions of notable figures from the involuntary African diaspora, from Toussaint Louverture to Malcolm X, who is the subject of another of her bodies of work.
Seen from one side, the figure stretches her arms imploringly towards Africa. From the other, the arms resemble the wings of the Nike of Samothrace, one of the most famous sculptures of the ancient world. Chase-Riboud’s insistence that a figure representing a kidnapped, enslaved African woman should bear the characteristics of a victory monument makes “Africa Rising” a memorial that does not mourn; a celebration whose joy is as fierce as its suffering.
Africa Rising was installed in the lobby of the Foley Square Building in 1998 alongside a collection of other significant artworks by artists of color. This free public art gallery was a major addition to the city, especially since little more than 2% of New York’s 800 outdoor public monuments were created by Black sculptors. But after 9/11, increased security measures greatly restricted access to this as well as many other federal buildings. After that, the best way to see “Africa Rising” was standing on Duane Street and catching a glimpse through a window.
I lived in New York City for more than 20 years before I learned about the existence of “Africa Rising.” After that, it took more than a month of unanswered phone calls and emails before I finally secured a spot on a National Park Service guided tour, which is the only way the general public can spend time with the art. When I arrived, I was told the tour had been cancelled. Only after pleading did I persuade a ranger, dressed in a khaki uniform more suited to a hike in Yosemite than crossing the lobby of an office building, to escort me to see it for a few hurried minutes.
Chase-Riboud is frustrated but not surprised at the fate of her largest sculpture. Born in a segregated Philadelphia in 1939, she well understands the way our country has treated Black artists. Her own father was rejected from architectural school on the grounds of his race. He began to paint, and as a child, Chase-Riboud would wander among the paintings that stood stacked up to the ceiling in the basement. At the opening of her first gallery show in New York City, she asked him what had become of them. He told her that he had burned his paintings, since “there was no point in allowing them to exist.”
In late May, “Africa Rising II,” a copy of New York’s sculpture, was unveiled by the Louvre in Paris’s Tuileries Garden. It is the culmination of a city-wide celebration of Chase-Riboud’s work, which took place in eight Parisian museums. She has lived in the city since 1961 — one of the many Black New Yorkers, including Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, and many of those currently leaving, to realize that the city at “the crossroads of the world” is far better at exploiting than honoring or even remembering their contributions.
“Bronze doesn’t burn,” Chase-Riboud remembers responding to her father when he told her what happened to his art. She tried to fight this fate by using fire to transform rather than destroy. But while she hoped “Africa Rising” would remind us about the Black lives crushed by the rise of our city, the fact that this sculpture is locked away from public view is a perfect example of the way our city wipes out reminders of things those in power are uncomfortable remembering. Chase-Riboud’s monument to silenced Black labor was itself silenced. Although “Africa Rising” still exists, it is nearly as inaccessible as Chase-Riboud’s father’s paintings.
New Yorkers need “Africa Rising” and works like it. Works that prod us into remembering the causes of current inequalities and the urgency of remedying them; that represent strength and resilience while recognizing sorrow. Following Paris’s example by putting “Africa Rising” on public display would be a small first step.
