Betye Saar seeks “to create works that expose injustice and reveal beauty.” The image etched into the surface of this “Spirit Chair” comes from a disturbing eighteenth-century print that depicts hundreds of kidnapped African adults and children forced into the hold of a transatlantic slave ship for the horrific Middle Passage to the Americas. Saar notes that “that slave ship imprint is on all of us. It is there forever! And it is also on the imprint of White Americans, too.”The metal box wrapped in padlocked chains not only evokes the weight of racially traumatic histories of enslavement and incarceration, but also the rich cultural heritage carried by peoples of African descent in the African Diaspora. Bent as if by a wave or the wind, but not broken, Diaspora’s Spirit commemorates both oppression and resistance, while also offering a place of rest for the individual spirits of past generations that endured and survived these histories.