Slave Ship

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    Photo: Stephen Pitkin/Pitkin Studio
1995
Found materials
83 x 122 x 35 inches
Collection of
New Orleans Museum of Art
Museum purchase and gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation
Description

We as people of Africa have a story to tell about a journey of four hundred years here in America. Kidnapped from the motherland of Africa, placed in chains and shackles, uprooted from family into slavery. Fifty-four thousand shiploads of men, women, children—three hundred packed into the bottom of a ship for a trip across the Atlantic Ocean to America. Of one hundred million African people taken into the Western Hemisphere, seventy-five million missing—only twenty-five million made it alive in the Middle Passage to America. What happened to the seventy-five million missing Africans?