THE MIDDLE PASSAGE PROJECT

ARTWORK 

The artwork in the Middle Passage Project was conceptualized as two bodies of work. In the first series, the ironing board is employed to represent the labor of the thousands of black women employed as domestic workers during the era of the artist's youth. The ironing board is metaphorically reconstructed into a slave ship to commemorate the millions of Africans sold into slavery. The carriage of one of the boards, for example, is filled with rags and bones to signify the loss of human life during the slave trade. A floor register is used as a symbol of the facade of Europeans and Christianity, which supposedly sought to save the African "heathens". The boards are mounted within a freestanding frame, which can be seen as a door, a passage. These passages represent the sacred and secular elements of African cultures that were forced into this country and which eventually developed into the labor of blacks, and specifically the work of those women domestic workers who came to use these ironing boards as part of their everyday lives.

The second part consists of a series of assemblages that pay homage to the vast and varied experiences of those Africans who endured the Middle Passage. These pieces are heavily textured and include found objects and artifacts. Together with the use of patterning and color, the MPP assemblages remind the viewer of the complex system of writing and communication associated with traditional West African and African American cultures.

Red and black are the recurring colors in the MPP series: black is a traditional color for Rozelle's work, and it is also a Western symbol for death. Within the African context, however, black is denoted in the counter-clockwise movement of the Congolese Cosmogram as symbolic of the stage before rebirth - the darkness of the water before re-emerging into life. The incorporation of found objects also alludes to the residual, and to the persistence of life. Together, a composition of a new life of struggle is formed.

The film "Sankofa" influenced the use of bird carcasses. The genocide, which ensued as an element of the Middle Passage, is remarkably similar to the contemporary period of genocide, which is prevalent in many African American communities, where youths are dying from gang wars and urban blight.

West African Luba memory boards use beads and other objects to record a communal history. Borrowing from that tradition, some MPP pieces also incorporate different every day objects such as buttons, safety pins, keys, beads, etc., to literally "hold in place" the object of culture, until African and African American cultures are properly fused.

The use of red cloth symbolizes a commodity for which Africans were sold. There were no known resources at that time to enable them to dye cloth this color. Red cloth was deemed very valuable, and the use of it in the MPP pieces, juxtaposed with the floating muted colors of lost souls sold into slavery and forced into the Middle Passage, speak to the atrocity that was the African slave trade.

We should never forget that Africans did not willingly accept their enslavement. Mutinies, suicide, and different means of resistance endured through the Middle Passage and the era of slavery in America. Materials such as knives, machetes, and shackles, speak to that resistance, which was always part of the African spirit. That spirit survived the most treacherous of conditions imposed upon any group of humans as a whole. Furthermore, it survived generation after generation of racial oppression and still struggles today against both blatantly obvious and subliminal methods of discrimination.