“As our ancestors moved between the worlds of enslavement and freedom, an innumerable fact existed… that everyone was transported beyond the familiar...”
Radcliffe Bailey, from The Portal (project description)

Working with Atlanta artist Radcliffe Bailey (1968-2023), our team developed a response to an invited competition from Davidson College to “propose a permanent, interactive space, and artwork” to commemorate the exploited labor of enslaved Africans that built Davidson College, and to provide a permanent memorial to their families still within the community.

The proposal is positioned off-axis to the formal campus grid, and in purposeful proximity between Eumenean and Philanthropic Halls, historic buildings built with slave labor, each with built-in porticos facing off across a space used for public debate.  The memorial provides a new campus destination for cloistered gathering, discussion, and elevated view.  It is a physical platforming of the historically dispossessed as full participants in the public space of a formal campus.  The central ceremonial passage is a direct reference to the “door of no return” through which captured Africans passed at the start of their enslaved journey to North America.