Since 1989, a Birmingham artist has spent 30-plus years turning a half-acre beside a cemetery into a walk-through history of Black America

On property in Birmingham's Titusville community, Joe Minter has spent decades assembling a sculpture environment he calls the African Village in America. Create Birmingham, a local arts group, describes it as the half-acre around his home, though accounts of the site's size vary, and calls the work one of Birmingham's and the country's cultural treasures. Minter started in 1989, and the project has kept growing since. The Encyclopedia of Alabama adds that he uses the yard to tell the 400-year history of Black Americans and that the property overlooks two cemeteries.Minter bought the Titusville property in 1970 and began building in 1989According to the Encyclopedia of Alabama, Minter was born on March 28, 1943, in Birmingham. He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1965 and honorably discharged in 1967. Afterward, he worked at Southeastern Metals, assembling school furniture from steel parts. He bought the Titusville land in 1970. After the firm closed in 1979, he worked at a paint-and-body shop and on construction projects. He later developed glaucoma, which the encyclopedia attributes to years of exposure to asbestos dust, and was forced to retire. Minter says that in the summer of 1989 he received a vision instructing him to tell the story of 400 years of Black Americans through art. According to the Encyclopedia of Alabama, Minter grew distressed on learning that Birmingham was planning a civil rights museum, fearing that the story of the movement's foot soldiers could be left out. Adopting the name of "peacemaker," he started creating the sculpture environment on his property.The property overlooks New Grace Hill Cemetery and Shadow Lawn Memorial ParkThe setting plays a significant role in determining the theme of the work. The property overlooks New Grace Hill Cemetery, the gravesite of his father, wife, and son. His father, who had served in the First World War, used to work as a caretaker of the Elmwood Cemetery, described as all-White. Minter grew up in Titusville as one of the eight children in a family that valued using what they had.Found metal, wood, and discarded objects form sculptures on slavery and the civil rights movementThe Encyclopedia of Alabama says the artist works mainly in metal and wood, using discarded objects and items from flea markets and thrift stores, while the Whitney Museum's description adds street signs, dolls, and bric-a-brac collected in his neighborhood, with metal as the main material. The work's themes include the African diaspora, slavery, racism, the civil rights movement, religion, and natural disasters.Some of the variations of Slave Ship America use wood, metal, and chains, and one of the largest is titled The Destruction of Two Cultures: Slave Ship, which is an interactive sculpture of cement bricks, wooden planks, and metal railings. The sculpture named African Matriarch includes wooden planks, tennis racquets, crutches, mattress springs and a car headlight, and there are also two sculptures of Zulu warriors of oxidized metal next to it. Birmingham Jail is a metal cage with names of civil rights activists and places painted on the doors, which have three wooden crosses covered in barbed wire with concrete dogs watching them. The yard also includes Four Little Girls and Martin Luther King Jr. and Bloody Sunday Memorial.Four works by Minter appeared in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, separate from the yardWhitney’s Audio Guide to its 2019 Biennial provides insight into the way the art community has been approaching the yard. According to Rujeko Hockley, one of the curators of the Biennial, African Village is Minter’s life's work and his attempt at constructing a history of African Americans in general and of their southern experience in particular.The Whitney emphasized that the pieces in the Biennial were not part of the yard. They were created separately but are connected by their use of metal, found objects and references to the African American experience. Specifically, 63 Foot Soldiers is recognized as the piece referring to the Civil Rights Movement, while the other three also have similar connotations.Minter bought the adjacent house in 2001 and his work entered museum collectionsHowever, his production exceeded the boundaries of the yard. According to the encyclopedia entry, he purchased the house and adjacent land next to the African Village in 2001 and transformed it into exhibition space. Moreover, it is said that the pieces are in museum collections such as the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art, and the High Museum of Art. The pieces of Minter have been exhibited along with other Black artists, including History Refused to Die: Highlights from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation Gift at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His work kept evolving. After the death of his wife Hilda in September 2021, he created several works in her honor, and the encyclopedia entry features one piece named Hilda at the front of the village. In 2024, he was selected as the recipient of a $100,000 grant from the Ruth Foundation for the Arts.The October 2024 exhibition and a preservation session focused on the site's futureJoe Minter Is Here was organized in October 2024 by Navigate Affordable Housing Partners and Create Birmingham. Create Birmingham describes it as a community-based installation of never-before-exhibited work, housed in the historic Marc Steel warehouse building in his own neighborhood. The group also held a session called "Joe Minter's African Village in America and the Paths for the Preservation of Art Environments." Jade Powers of the Birmingham Museum of Art moderated, and the speakers were Katherine Jentleson of the High Museum of Art, LaStarsha McGarity of Tuskegee University, and Laura Bickford of the Kohler Arts Center. Create Birmingham said the session was held because of the uncertain future of Minter's art environment and personal collection. Because the village is an outdoor sculpture environment made from found materials, it remains vulnerable to weather and decay.You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.