"What impressed me was the way people didn't have any feeling for another person's well being," explains Stephen Hayes. "They way they packed people on the ships. If they died, they died. They'll still get money for the amount of people they have on the ship."
The 28-year-old artist and Durham resident is referring to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade during the 16th and 19th Centuries.
It's the theme of his latest exhibition, Cash Crop at Guilford College in the Guilford College Art Gallery. Tonight he'll speak about his work during a public reception at the school’s Art Gallery. The reception is from 6-7:30 p.m
Cash Crop is comprised of 15 life-size human sculptures dipicting men, women and two children who traveled through the Atlantic Middle passage during the slave trade that helped build the New World. The figures have shackles on their necks, hands and feet and each one represents one million Africans enslaved. According to Hayes, some people today are still seen as mere commodities. "Coming across the image of the Brooks ship plan reminded me of a sweatshop in a Third World Country," says Hayes. "So I wanted to relate the past to the present and how today we out-source our goods to these sweat shops and these people are packed inside these sweat shops as if they were packed into a Brooks ship just to produce as much goods as possible.”
On the back of each figure is a wooden slab with Hayes’ carved depiction of a Brooks Slave ship. During the slave trade, merchants packed in an estimated 600 African men, women and children and transported them as goods for sale. Hayes says since most goods come into the U.S. on pallets and still do, chains from each figure connects it to one large pallet baring the carved image of the U.S. emblem. Other elements in the show illustrate the economics similarities of the Atlantic slave trade to present day Third World sweatshops. “I created this show as a history lesson of how America was built. No one else would have made it for free or cropped the land or built these buildings for free," according to Hayes. "People were just looking for the easy way out. If I don’t want to do it then I’ll pay somebody or make somebody else do it.” Hayes sculpted and carved all of the elements in this show. He says it too him 5 months to complete.
