Joe Minter: Once That River Starts To Flow

Joe Minter is ”The Magic City” and “The Magic City” is Joe Minter. He is one of a long line of decedents of emancipated slaves, farmers, coal miners, and steelworkers who built Birmingham into the city it is. To visit Joe’s home is a to take a walk in the deepest recesses of American history. Abutting right up to his property is the Shadow Lawn Memorial Gardens, “ancestral African burial grounds” where Michelle Obama’s great-great grandfather is buried besides countless hero veterans of war who made the ultimate sacrifice for our country. Minter frequently ends his long days by sitting beside the cemetery, not talking, “just listening to the 70,000 collective years of lessons the ancestors can teach him.”

This is sincerity and honesty that Minter makes work out of. For the past 40 years he has kept a visual diary of American tragedies. Covering every empty inch of his half-acre yard is the African Village in America, monuments after monuments to our absolute worst and our often unrealized potential to be our best. There are artworks that depict a re-creation of the Birmingham jail cell that held Martin Luther King Jr., the Sandy Hook school shooting, the tsunami in Japan, Ferguson police, and on and on and on. We are surrounded by scrolled bible verses and passages and pleas for unity. Every turn is another lesson, a chance to learn.

Leaving the African Village in America fully intact this exhibition presents a parallel aspect of Minter’s remarkable artistic output; large-scale sculptures made as stand-alone artworks. These works contain materials gathered in an industrial city: rusty iron and steel, thick ropes, stout chains, hubcaps, and basketball hoops. An anchor held afloat transforms into a lesson on African Americans in the Armed Services, crutches become warrior spears, basketball rims provide a lesson on attempting upward mobility thru athletic ability. Behind it all this work captures an optimism that if we sit for a moment, listen to the lessons in the wind, that we finally might get it right.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website