middle passage

Nearly 10 years removed from its 2016 opening, she said she still feels the overwhelming sense of "appreciation" for her ancestors' strength and resilience when walking through the museum's "Door of No Return," meant to evoke the final stopping point on the West African coast before enslaved Africans began their forced journey across the Atlantic during the Middle Passage.

The sparkly element symbolizes a space of both historical trauma — recalling the death and drowning of so many enslaved Africans during the Middle Passage in the Atlantic — and healing.

Roy focuses in particular on how these Black writers responded to the experience of the Middle Passage — the traumatic journey from Africa to America made by newly enslaved people — which he describes as “cheating social death,” and on how they used “the established part of an existing system to create a new one that serves a fundamentally different form or function.”

Her recent solo exhibition, “All of No Man’s Land Is Ours,” at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, explored her longtime preoccupation with marine life, the Middle Passage and the transportation of enslaved people.

Unlike the King Center, his focus was on the whole African American experience, from Africa to the Middle Passage, and from enslavement to the civil rights campaign and beyond.