It is a wall of one-gallon storage jars, 800 of them, stacked back-to-back, making the wall two jars deep. Each jar contains soil taken from the site of a lynching that took place over the century following the Civil War. Affixed to the front of each jar is a label with the name of the victim, plus the date and place of the lynching. Each side of the memorial wall is lit, and shelf lights catch all sides of the jars, emphasizing their three-dimensionality and making them almost glow, like spices on a giant spice rack or the healing ingredients on the shelves of an apothecary. Coming after horrific scenes of racial violence, these literal earth-tones are calming.
Ever the art critic, however, I found myself wondering about the placement of the jars. They’re not organized by victim’s name, place of murder, date, or the color of the jars’ soil. How, then, were the jars placed? I spoke with a spokeswoman for the Equal Justice Initiative, who informed me that the 800 jars on display were only a portion of the jars the Community Remembrance Project has collected. The jars on view are replaced by others from time to time to give each victim his or her chance to be remembered, and any attempt to re-order the exhibit each time a jar is exchanged would be an impossible task. The jars are replaced at random, with no consideration given to the overall visual impact. The piece is simply a memorial, not a work of art.
And yet, decisions were made that pull the memorial into something approaching art. The size of the jars, for example – each jar is the largest size, one gallon, that is easily handled by the average person. If this piece were simply a memorial, half-pint jars of soil could fulfil the symbolic purpose. Furthermore, the jars in the memorial are placed on shelves to make up a wall. Imagine if the memorial were composed of half-pint jars placed in the drawers of cabinets. Pulling out drawer after drawer, each containing, say, 50 jars with labels pasted to their lids might be a sobering or a horrifying experience, but the experience would lack the jolt of beauty that the actual installation delivers.
Perhaps it is wrong to consider the wall in an aesthetic sense, but I can’t help doing so, and, oddly, having beauty wedded to the evil helps ensure that remembrance lasts. Two months after my visit to the museum, I can only vaguely remember the slave ship routes, the statistics of the slave sales, or the newspaper headlines of stories detailing attacks on Freedom Riders. Yet the memory of that lovely wall, composed of blocks of color remains and, with it, the knowledge that each of the 800 jars on view memorializes someone who died in a horrible fashion. My people did this to them.
Slaughter, executions, and aerial bombings have found their way into the art of Goya, Manet, Picasso, and dozens of other artists. We may be appalled by the scenes, but the artist’s accomplishment does not permit us to look away. In the words of Yeats, a terrible beauty is born.
