Two decades in the making, the Charleston International African American Museum is open to the public. The museum building serves as a memorial to the approximately 100,000 enslaved Africans who passed through the site.
Historians estimate that 45 percent of enslaved Africans entered the United States through Gadsden's Wharf in Charleston, South Carolina. But until recently, the site was conspicuously absent of memorials or any other indication of its past. Few knew the significance of the place.
Finally, that has changed. Now located on Gadsden's Wharf is the International African American Museum (IAAM), an institution dedicated to the untold stories of the African American experience.
IAAM opened to the public on June 27, effectively concluding 20 years of planning, fundraising and construction efforts undertaken in Charleston and beyond. For Tonya Matthews, the museum's inaugural president and CEO, it was worth the wait. “Every time I look back at what we were discussing, say, five years ago, what I realize is that if the museum had opened at any other time, it really would have been a different space.”
“Ten years ago,” Matthews added, “we wouldn't really have been located on the Gadsden's Wharf site – and that, of course, has become a signature and landmark for us.”
The building itself incorporates the site's long-lost memorial. Designed by the late architect Henry Cobb, the IAAM sits atop 18 single-story pillars, its body suspended above the ground in a gesture of respect for the slaves who once walked the land below.
“As the place where thousands of Africans from diverse cultures first set foot in North America, Gadsden's Wharf is not only the right place to tell this story; it is hallowed ground,” Hood, who died in 2020, once said. “The museum’s special design challenge was to build on this site without occupying it.”
Beneath the towering building, there are two reflection spots, both designed by MacArthur Award-winning landscape artist Walter Hood: a “Tide Tribute” sculpture to the enslaved Africans who passed through Gadsden's Wharf and an ethnobotanical “African Ancestors Memorial Garden,” filled with plants. native to West Africa, the Caribbean and the Lowcountry of South Carolina.
Inside, the 100,000-square-foot building features nine exhibition spaces and a collection of nearly 700 objects, nearly all of which are on view. This includes historic artifacts like slave handcuffs and antique Mardi Gras costumes, as well as art by Jacob Lawrence, Kara Walker, and Carrie Mae Weems, among others. The mix of materials, Matthews said, instantiates one of the museum's core tenets: "the constant interweaving of trauma and joy."
“[It's] not trauma on display on the left and joy on display on the right, but much more like the African-American experience itself, which is a constant weaving,” explained the head of IAAM.
Source: Artnet News