51�Թ�

The sparkly element symbolizes a space of both historical trauma — recalling the death and drowning of so many enslaved Africans during the Middle Passage in the Atlantic — and healing.

Roy focuses in particular on how these Black writers responded to the experience of the Middle Passage — the traumatic journey from Africa to America made by newly enslaved people — which he describes as “cheating social death,” and on how they used “the established part of an existing system to create a new one that serves a fundamentally different form or function.”

Her recent solo exhibition, “All of No Man’s Land Is Ours,” at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, explored her longtime preoccupation with marine life, the Middle Passage and the transportation of enslaved people.

Unlike the King Center, his focus was on the whole African American experience, from Africa to the Middle Passage, and from enslavement to the civil rights campaign and beyond.

The Middle Passage transforms them to this unified thing.