Client: McDonogh School

Overview

The memorial is in an outdoor oval garden, defined by a a multilayered 14’ steel sculpture representing two individuals as profile busts, supported with sugarcane stalks and a sweet gum tree. A low brick wall on which people are welcome to sit steps up into a marble water wall, with etched inscriptions of the 100+ names of those enslaved by John McDonogh. The space provides an active, vibrant teaching and learning environment for quiet work, reflection, and contemplation at McDonogh School.

Goals

The ‘Memorial to those Enslaved and Freed’ in Owings Mills, MD is a multi-part memorial created to establish as clearly as possible the relationship between John McDonogh’s wealth and the institution of slavery. Such a relationship needs to be understood on multiple levels. On the broadest level, slavery was interwoven socially, politically, and especially economically in the development of the United States during McDonogh’s life. More specifically, McDonogh’s circumstances placed him at the center, rather than on the periphery, of this system.

The memorial represents the collective journey to embrace the contributions and the lives of many individuals—their achievement, resistance, and spiritual resilience came at a high cost in the moral darkness of America. Full consideration was also given to the plants surrounding the memorial, where sweet gum trees and herbal flowers were planted.

Process

The bust of the public monument is cast from molds designed by lead artist, Oletha DeVane, while Christopher Kojzar served as the alternate artist to build 3D models for the sculpture and plinth; consult on design, lettering and artifact choices; draft drawings for the plaques, and shape budget proposals.

The busts are reimagined as faces of two enslaved individuals connected to John McDonogh. More fully, the sculpture pays homage to hundreds of people who labored as slaves on McDonogh’s estates in Louisiana. The names are found on a granite water-wall flanked by seating space for those who come to reflect on its history. The Memorial to Those Enslaved and Freed is meant to make the lives of Black people who were enslaved by John McDonogh visible. The people whose names are on the wall were laborers, teachers, ministers, healers, farmers, and children who we now know and acknowledge.