400 Men of African Descent
Date1997
Maker
Marita Dingus
American, born 1956
Label TextSlavery is a scar on human civilization, and it is still rare to see the victims of it commemorated individually. The men here assert a shocking reminder of how cruel humans can be. Marita Dingus created them after a visit to Elmina Castle in Ghana, which was the world’s largest port for the transatlantic slave trade for centuries. She was shown rooms where 200 women and 400 men were held in dungeons before being shipped to the Americas. The atrocity of this history led Dingus to spend one and a half years carefully remembering one person at a time.
As she said, “I was raised a Catholic, so I grew up praying the rosary. So, the whole idea of repetition as prayer is something I understand. Making these figures meant a lot of repetition. I used discarded materials because I see people of African descent being used during the era of slavery and then discarded.”
Marita Dingus recently said, "400 Men and 200 Women of African Descent are a Hail Mary, a visual prayer, if you repeat a phrase enough times it may fix a situation." The situation needing attention is the memory of a place that often causes profound psychological disturbance. While on a 1992 travel grant to attend a conference on black studies in Ghana, Marita was taken to Elmina Castle. There she toured the dungeons where Africans from the continent's interior were confined in small rooms waiting for ships that would carry them across the Atlantic. Appalled by the conditions and the consequences of these rooms, Dingus resolved to acknowledge her experience. For a year and a half, she made figures to pay respects to Africans who were treated "as a commodity for 300 years."
Object number98.43
Photo CreditPhoto: Susan A. Cole
She pays her respects to a history of pain.
Vicki Halper, 2003
Credit LineAfrican Art Acquisition Fund
MediumCloth and mixed media
Gary Hill
2014
Object number: 2020.15.15
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