THE COMMONS
A Monumental Moment A traveling exhibition focusing on African American history lands in Philadelphia.
A
Hank Willis Thomas’s All Power to the People with the PMA in the background.
QUEEN VILLAGE QUARTERLY CRIER \\ WINTER 2022
traveling, outdoor art installation, now in the city, offers an opportunity to observe Martin Luther King Jr. Day by exploring aspects of the African American experience. The installation and its sculptures invite people to consider issues of colonization, Black middle-class labor, the decline of industry, and the prison pipeline. But it also illuminates Black power, Black pride, and Black joy. Called Monumental Tour and mounted by the cultural equity initiative Kindred Arts, the exhibition features sculptural works by Arthur Jafa, Coby Kennedy, Christopher Myers, and Hank Willis Thomas at four carefully considered locations around the city. Their pieces have rotated through cities around the country—New York, Atlanta, Chicago, and elsewhere. In Philadelphia, the exhibition has been dedicated to the city’s first African American architect, Julian Francis Abele. For Thomas’s All Power to the People, this will be its second appearance in Philadelphia. The sculpture, which joins together two symbols of Black identity—the Afro pick and the Black Power salute—was part of the 2017 Monument Lab project. Today, it sits in Eakins Oval, just across from one of Abele’s most famous buildings, the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Christopher Myers’ Caliban’s Hands, referencing the enslaved character in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, addresses the suppression of indigenous cultures
