In Charleston, a Powerful New Landscape Recounts the Harrowing Passage of Enslaved People
This week marked the opening of the International African American Museum (IAAM), a new museum in Charleston, South Carolina, devoted to the history and heritage of African Americans and the Black diaspora. The waterfront museum, which took a decade to design and build, houses artifacts, art, and archival materials mapping the purchase, transportation, arrival, and lives of America’s enslaved community, all in a bridgelike building whose design was led by the late architect Henry Cobb of Pei Cobb Freed.
IAAM is located on Gadsden’s Wharf, the largest point of entry for enslaved Africans in pre- and postcolonial American history. Nearly half of all enslaved Africans brought to America first landed here after crossing the so-called Middle Passage, with roughly 100,000 landing between 1783 and 1807, either on their way to other states or condemned to Charleston as their final destination. The site is charged with their presence, the fear and squalor of their transportation, as well as the hard-won liberation of their descendants.
Misery may permeate these grounds, but it’s also a place of hope. Surrounding IAAM is a 2.4-acre landscape and memorial garden designed by multidisciplinary landscape firm Hood Design Studio. “We wanted the site to be sullen at times, but also a place of celebration,” the firm’s founder, award-winning landscape artist Walter Hood, tells ELLE DECOR.
The museum itself is host to nine distinct galleries, exploring the manifold cultural, economic, artistic, and social contributions of enslaved Africans and their descendants to American culture. Hood and his team sought to create a landscape that underscored the museum’s curatorial program while creating spaces outside where visitors could contemplate, commemorate, and celebrate. “The first thing we considered was how to treat the grounds of the museum as a source informing the entire experience,” Hood says.
In 2016, Hood along with principal Paul Peters, worked with a group of scholars, architects, and artists to grasp the history and ecology of Charleston and South Carolina’s Lowcountry. Together, they conducted a three-day tour of significant sites, including the pest houses of Sullivan’s Island and several Gullah hamlets in North Charleston. A visit to Middleton Place, in which the design team experienced the home of the plantation’s master and the dwellings of its enslaved peoples was a particular touchstone. “That visit was an incredibly powerful experience, as they had just begun to organize annual family reunions with the descendants of the enslaved on the plantation. That definitely influenced the project,” Hood says. “We asked millions of questions and critiqued as well as experienced.”
The design team opted to approach the landscape via the points of a compass, with each approach from the north, south, east, and west offering its own distinct experience. If you approach the museum from the city, you come through a landscape of exaggerated rolling dunes planted with Bahia grass referencing how the shore would have originally appeared. From the north, visitors encounter the African Ancestors Memorial Garden, a swath of land (among the first that enslaved Africans would have touched on North American shores) defined by a meandering pathway and native Carolina species like soft rush, sweetgrass, and cypress, and also plantings of African origin. It’s meant to conjure “hush harbors,” clandestine spaces where enslaved people would secretly congregate to socialize and share stories. Smaller gardens at IAAM encourage visitors to do the same.
From the water on the museum’s east edge, guests encounter a paved plaza that sweeps beneath the building and the water’s edge fountain, a water feature that fills and empties with the tide and delineates the boundary of the historic wharf. When full, the boundary between sea and land blur. When empty, row upon row of abstracted figures appear on the pavement, a haunting evocation of the enslaved Africans packed upon ships and a somber reminder of the violence inflicted upon Black bodies ever since. Hood calls it the landscape’s “most powerful element.” He adds: “We were thinking about the body and how the enslaved were crammed inside these ships, how water and bodies become a metaphor for the crossing and those lost.”
Another moment of silence defines the warehouse walk, a path that runs east to west across the site, tracing the footprint of where the enslaved were warehoused. Here, monumental walls made of gleaming granite funnel you toward the harbor. Marking the journey is a series of cast-concrete sculptures of life-size crouching Black figures. “It’s an evocation of those who were lost there,” Hood says—but also, a tribute to those who are still here.
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