The Meaning of
the Sculpture Program in
Our Mother of Africa Chapel
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The narrative begins
with slave traders raiding an African village. They take men, women, and
children from the sanctity and safety of their tribal homes and herd
them into the hole of one of the many small merchant ships active in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the “triangular route” of
transatlantic trade. Setting out from London, Bristol, and Liverpool,
these three-masted, square-stern vessels, approximately sixty f’eet
long, loaded with brass, pewter, woolens, East Indian textiles, arms,
glass beads, and the like, traveled to the coast of West Africa.
Once these wares were
bartered for slaves and ivory the traders set sail for Jamaica,
Barbados, South Carolina, or Virginia. That leg of the voyage was known
as the Middle Passage. In that two- to three-month trip across the
Atlantic more than 200 slaves - men, women, and children - would be
wedged into a hole ten feet deep and approximately twenty-three feet
wide. In the New World, they were traded for cargoes of sugar, tobacco,
hardwoods, indigo, and ginger bound for the return voyage to English and
European markets.
 At the entrance to the
chapel of the floor of the nave is an abstraction in bronze relief of
the Henrietta Maria, a seventeenth-century slave ship, which was
discovered in 1972, thirty-four miles west of Key West, Florida.
Those who survived the
Middle Passage were sold at public auctions into slavery Early on, many
rebelled. From the runaway slave to the Underground Railway to Canada
and freedom, the courageous spirit of the African American is portrayed
here. With the shackles of slavery finally broken, African Americans
begin to confront prejudice and discrimination by means of Civil Rights
marches, legislation, and prayer, through the inspiration of the Holy
Spirit, who reigns above and dwells within. The narrative culminates in
the quest for full emancipation realized in the African American family
of today.
The mother and father
are modeled fully in the round. As if freed from the bronze of the
relief, they step into the spectator’s space and lift up their arms in
supplication to Christ on the cross, while their young son and daughter
gaze with hope across the nave to Our Mother of Africa and the Infant
Jesus. Thus, the formal narrative, and symbolic elements of the drama of
Mary’s eternal intercession for her African American children are fully
integrated through the sacred conversation.
Our Mother of Africa Chapel
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