Joe Minter

Rujeko Hockley: Joe Minter is an artist based in Birmingham, Alabama, where for the last thirty-plus years he’s been working on his life’s work, an installation on his own property called African Village. African Village is assembled of various found materials including, primarily metal, but also street signs, dolls, all sorts of bric-a-brac that he’s found around his neighborhood, all of which is kind of building, in his mind, a large history of the African American experience, particularly in the American South.

Narrator: Biennial co-curator Rujeko Hockley.

Rujeko Hockley: The pieces on view in the Biennial are not a part of African Village, they were made separately from that work. However, like African Village they carry his interest in materials, in metal specifically, in creating forms through found objects as well as alluding specifically to incidents in American history relating to African Americans. In the work 63 Foot Soldiers, he’s thinking specifically about the Civil Rights Movement. The other three works that you see are not quite as directly related to events but also carry some of those connotations.