“The way you make an African a slave, you make him invisible. I’m making the African visible.” — Joe Minter

Joe Minter’s famous Birmingham, Alabama, “yard show,” which he terms the “African Village in America,” uses sculptural constructions to document the history of Africans and Black people in America and to instill communal pride.

Created from welded pickaxes and shovels, Minter’s "Camel at the Water Hole" critiques the exploitative histories of slavery, sharecropping, convict leasing, and Jim Crow segregation, which treated Black workers as “beasts of burden,” akin to camels. Echoing historians who assert that the wealth and power of the United States rest on a foundation of slavery, Minter notes, “My African ancestors built America on the sweat of their backs, in their blood, in their life—free slave labor—and the only pay is death.”