For 30-Plus Years, Birmingham Artist Joe Minter Has Turned a Half-Acre Beside Two Cemeteries Into a Walk-Through History of Black America

On property in Birmingham's Titusville community, artist Joe Minter has spent more than three decades assembling a sprawling 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 began in 1989, and the project has kept growing ever since. The Encyclopedia of Alabama notes that he uses the yard to tell the 400-year history of Black Americans, and that the property overlooks two cemeteries.

From steel factory worker to 'peacemaker'

According 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. He grew distressed on learning that Birmingham was planning a civil rights museum, fearing the story of the movement's foot soldiers could be left out. Adopting the name of "peacemaker," he began creating the sculpture environment on his property.

A setting steeped in meaning

The location plays a significant role in the work's theme. The property overlooks New Grace Hill Cemetery and Shadow Lawn Memorial Park — New Grace Hill being the gravesite of his father, wife, and son. His father, a First World War veteran, had worked as a caretaker of Elmwood Cemetery, described as all-White. Minter grew up in Titusville as one of eight children in a family that valued using what they had.

Sculptures of slavery, memory and civil rights

Minter 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.

Among the pieces: variations of Slave Ship America in wood, metal and chains, including one of the largest works, The Destruction of Two Cultures: Slave Ship, an interactive sculpture of cement bricks, wooden planks and metal railings. African Matriarch incorporates wooden planks, tennis racquets, crutches, mattress springs and a car headlight, flanked by two oxidized-metal sculptures of Zulu warriors. Birmingham Jail is a metal cage bearing the names of civil rights activists and places painted on its doors, with three wooden crosses covered in barbed wire and concrete dogs watching over them. The yard also includes Four Little Girls, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Bloody Sunday Memorial.

National recognition

Minter's reach extends well beyond the yard. Four of his works — created separately but connected by their use of metal, found objects and references to the African American experience, including 63 Foot Soldiers, which references the Civil Rights Movement — appeared in the Whitney Museum's 2019 Biennial. Curator Rujeko Hockley described African Village as Minter's life's work and his attempt at constructing a history of African Americans in general and of their southern experience in particular.

In 2001, Minter bought the adjacent house and land and transformed them into exhibition space. His pieces are held in museum collections including the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art and the High Museum of Art, and have been exhibited alongside other Black artists in shows such as 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, including a 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.

An uncertain future

In October 2024, the exhibition Joe Minter Is Here was organized by Navigate Affordable Housing Partners and Create Birmingham — a community-based installation of never-before-exhibited work housed in the historic Marc Steel warehouse building in his own neighborhood. The groups also held a session, "Joe Minter's African Village in America and the Paths for the Preservation of Art Environments," moderated by Jade Powers of the Birmingham Museum of Art, with speakers 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.