"I don’t consider myself an artist. I consider myself a creator."

As soon as I heard these words from  Stephen Hayes through the phone, I sat back in my chair. It wasn’t just the authority of his tone but the sense that he was totally in control of his talent and his vision that made me glad I’d asked him for an interview. Mr. Hayes, a recent recipient of a masters degree in fine arts from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) is currently showing his master’s thesis, titled Cash Crop, at the Mason Murer Fine Arts Gallery in Atlanta. Cash Crop is comprised of fifteen life size relief sculptures of former slaves that serve for Hayes as a symbolic representation of the fifteen million Africans imported to the New World from 1540 to 1850. It is a must see installation, a massive multimedia piece that is as emotionally riveting as it is aesthetically engaging.

 

 

“I am a creator that dreams and enjoys developing engaging objects out of voids. My work is mixed media consisting of wood, clay, fibers, found objects, and recycled materials, in conjunction with printmaking.”

 Stephen Hayes

 

I don’t know what I was supposed to say or think when I first saw Cash Crop. I did what I always do when I encounter something new—try to catalogue it, attempt to deconstruct it, begin to quantify intellectually its discrete elements. But after wandering through the life sized sculptures, the familiarity of each individual model’s features and body parts began to get to me. I finally had to stop when I saw the face of one figure. It was a face of a man whose air of resignation combined with the foreboding sense of fear depicted by his tightly clenched jaws in such a way that the figure seemed to say directly to me “this is how you got here.”

In some ways, it was as if I was seeing in three dimensions an unspeakable, unimaginable level of human suffering that was directly connected to my own past. The chilling collective of finely detailed faces, many of them showing traces of their Ibos and Ashanti and Mandinka origin in the abundant arches of their eye sockets and the lavish flare of their nostrils and the vigorous thrust of their cheekbones and the meaty curve of their lips, totally rearranged my perspective on the Middle Passage, making those harrowing ocean voyages more personal than any history book ever could.

 

In 1860 slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America's manufacturing, all of the railroads, all of the productive capacity of the United States put together. Slaves were the single largest, by far, financial asset of property in the entire American economy.

“Again With The Black Confederates”, Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic