THE WAY OUT
Joe Minter's African Village in America is filled with his sculpture sourced from scrap metal, flea markets, and street castaways. BY CHRIS BYRNE
Joe Minter, Working Our Way Out of the Ghetto, 2008, sports equipment (tennis rackets; boxing gloves; baseball glove; football, baseball, and equestrian helmets; masks; basketball goals; baseball bat), trumpet valves, rubber gloves, pipe hangers, chains, plowshare, and found metal, 76 x 96 x 32 in. Collection of Brett and Lester Levy, Jr., Dallas. Photograph courtesy of Pierre Le Hors.
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orn and based in Birmingham, Alabama, Joe Minter is the son of a caretaker of a white cemetery. Drawn to art at a young age, his African Village in America, conceived in 1980, pays homage to African American history through sculpture, from the time of the first arrival of enslaved Africans to the present. Spurred by a work on view at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Chris Byrne interviews the artist here:
Chris Byrne (CB): The Nasher Sculpture Center recently installed Working Our Way Out of the Ghetto (2008) in the museum’s Foundations gallery, to accompany the current Mark di Suvero: Steel Like Paper exhibition— can you tell us about your piece? Joe Minter (JM): You know, for us living in the inner city, one formula for us to work our way out was sports. We could take an old rim off of a bicycle tire and nail it to a wall or telegram post. A lot of us saw sports as a way out. There weren’t a lot of ways out.
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You see the hands and the prison bars; the prison system was the way so many made it out. The chains and plow show the system of Jim Crow sharecropping. Our ghettos weren’t always in the city. CB: Your sculptures are typically assembled with found materials... JM: My materials come from flea markets and the street and anywhere people have used materials and don’t want them anymore. There is so much waste in Birmingham [Alabama]. They call it the magic city because of the steel, and that’s the material I work with. We had all the raw materials here to make steel. We were the industrial capital of the South. CB: In 2016 you visited Dallas to participate in a panel discussion with your lifelong friend, the art patron Bill Arnett—what was your impression of the city? JM: Dallas to me was a rich city because of the black gold. That was the first time I went to Dallas, and I didn’t think I’d ever make it there. But I remember I came across the old TV show called Dallas, but I don’t watch TV unless it’s the news or PBS. I didn’t pay