 For the wanderlust planning 2024 travel destinations, consider (drumroll, please)... Alabama. Yes, that's right. After a year of unusually high unique travel, including dancing at Mardi Gras, sailing in the Persian Gulf, and farming on an Italian mountaintop, an art tour of Alabama proved to have the most lasting impression. When you go, The Legacy Museum, a stunning visually and technologically rich project by the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, is a must see. The Equal Justice Initiative is a private legal nonprofit committed to ending excessively harsh and economically unjust punishment. This museum makes clear the throughline from enslavement to mass incarceration. A ban on photography gave the gift of presence to soak it all in. Crashing waves first pierce the somber silence as you enter the museum, a reminder that this story starts at the transatlantic slave trade. An imposing digital wall of water follows and data maps continuously project routes of the slave trade. Ghanaian artist Kwame Akoto-Bamfo’s Nkyinkyim installation brought me to a standstill. Concrete African heads in a variety of expressions - some shackled at the neck, some very young children - rest on a simulated ocean floor, a reminder that an estimated 1.8 million Africans still lie in those unmarked graves. Overpowered by sights and sounds and equally haunting as the mountains of shoes in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, I retreated to a corner and wept. Could I continue on or would I retreat? A stranger kindly approached and we embraced. Her knowing nod and encouraging words persuaded me to forge ahead.
Art reminds us that the past must be confronted. Determined to also visit the 16th Street Baptist Church, my travel companion and I rented a car for the drive to Birmingham, stopping for delicious cobbler at Peach Park on the way. Always searching for new works to share with my students, we visited the Birmingham Museum of Art and serendipitously stumbled upon Dawoud Bey’s The Birmingham Project. Sixteen strikingly large diptych photographic portraits cast 32 actual Birmingham residents side-by-side: one model the age of the bombing victims at the time of their murder, the other the age they would have been had they lived. This dichotomy called attention to time: both how young the victims were and how recent the Jim Crow era is in American history. In an adjoining room handwritten notes from visitors are displayed, pouring out sincere apologies and messages from former friends, alive and living in Birmingham during the bombing and today. Art reminds us that today is a gift. On an evening walking from the Montgomery riverfront to the Alabama State Capitol in search of ice cream on a surprisingly empty night, we instead discovered the Alabama Bicentennial Park at the base of the capitol steps. Sixteen wonderfully intricate bronze relief sculptures by Caleb O’Conner educated us on 200 years of Alabama history. A storybook brought to life, each panel bustled with vibrant landscape and characters, accompanying text beneath explaining each chapter. I reveled in silence that was no longer eerie but luxurious, granting the ability to draw near and linger. The final panel, titled “Alabama’s Third Century” of a futuristic scene of people floating in space, described my experience well: “Alabama’s citizens are the people of a new century. They have the honesty, the insight, and the compassion to examine their past. They have the ability to purge the bad and retain the good. They have the imagination to ask for more and the judgment to know if it has been granted. The past is a lesson. The present is a time for action. A better future beckons.” Art reminds us that the future has yet to be created.Rich with history, culture, and a 17-acre Freedom Monument Sculpture Park opening in 2024, Alabama was more beautiful, friendly, and forward thinking than I anticipated. Visiting is a necessary education for every American: a reminder to face our past, to persist with gratitude in our present, and that together we can build a better tomorrow.
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