Figure I · The Base

The Slave Ancestor

His body is closest to the ground, hands and feet bound in chains. His face supports the feet of the soldier above — he struggles to lift those he cannot even see. He has no rights; his face is practically in the ground. Yet he persists. His bound hands support the struggling Union martyr above him. The ancestor's face mirrors the baby's at the apex: both pressed flat, one to the earth, one to her mother's back — a visual loop connecting the first and last.

Figure II · The Martyr

The Lynched Union Soldier

An unknown Black Union Army soldier with a noose around his neck — he gave everything for a country that did not recognize his humanity. He struggles to raise the American flag even as he bears the weight of the mother above him. In his hand he carries the Memory Jug: an American folk-art tradition of memorializing the dead, a vessel covered in cowrie shells, chains, and ancestral symbols — paying homage to all those whose stories can never be added to the official monument column.

Figures III & IV · The Apex

The Mother, the Baby & the Blank Slate

The mother activist rises at the top — lantern in one hand, placard in the other, baby on her back. She screams forward. She is mending broken men, raising the next generation, and protesting for her child's future simultaneously. "She's only shouting so that her baby will have a better place in the future," Akoto-Bamfo has said.

The placard she holds is the most important symbol of all. It is left blank — by design. Whatever the people need to say, they say it. The four images here show just a fraction of what visitors wrote: Breonna Taylor. The March Continues. This Is America. Get Black Where You Came From.

Interactive Technology

A Placard That Listens

What looks like a paper protest sign is in fact a 32-inch Visionect electronic paper display — powered by a concealed battery pack, connected via Wi-Fi through a Raspberry Pi, and updated in real time through a custom content management system.

Visitors submit their messages through a companion app. Within moments, those words appear on the placard held by the mother at the top of the monument — literally placing the public's voice in her hands.

The display was designed by interactive artist Brendan Burke of BB Projects, LLC. Says Burke: "Countless times I saw someone look at the sign, look away, and then look back and be shocked, asking 'Did that change?!' Everyone thought it was a static sign made of paper, and the jaw-on-the-floor wow factor when they saw it was dynamic was supremely satisfying."

Engineering

Built to Travel

Blank Slate was engineered from the outset to move. The monument is mounted on a custom flatbed truck fitted with a hydraulic tilt system that lowers and raises the sculpture for transport and installation. When on display, the truck's infrastructure disappears entirely — the monument appears to stand freely on its platform, giving no indication of how it arrived or how it will leave.

This engineering made it possible for a 750-pound, 15-foot sculpture to appear overnight at Times Square, at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and outside the Martin Luther King Jr. Center — and to be gone just as quickly. The monument doesn't ask for permission to take up space in the public square. It arrives, it speaks, and it moves on to the next city.

Over two years, the monument traveled over 3,000 miles, appearing in 14 cities across 9 states. Its route was not arbitrary — every stop was chosen for its significance in African American history and the ongoing civil rights movement.

Nkyinkyim Installation at the Legacy Museum, Montgomery, Alabama. Sculpture by Kwame Akoto-Bamfo depicts a man wearing an iron collar like those used on people kidnapped from Africa and trafficked to the Americas. Photo: Equal Justice Initiative.

In 2018, Akoto-Bamfo received one of the most significant public art commissions in recent memory: a permanent installation at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama — the Equal Justice Initiative's landmark sites dedicated to the legacy of slavery, racial terror lynchings, and mass incarceration.

The Nkyinkyim Installation — seven shackled figures, three male, three female, and a baby, connected to one another — made a profound trans-Atlantic journey: from Akoto-Bamfo's studio in Ghana, to Cape Coast Castle (through whose dungeons millions of enslaved people passed before the Middle Passage), to the tomb of Kwame Nkrumah, to Ussher Fort, and finally to Montgomery, Alabama, where it now stands permanently at the entrance of the memorial.

Streaks of red and copper rust flow from the figures' chains down their bodies like blood. The New York Times called the memorial "one of the most powerful and effective new memorials created in a generation."

Nestled in the farmlands of Nuhalenya-Ada in Ghana's Greater Accra region, the Nkyinkyim Museum is Akoto-Bamfo's most sustained creative achievement — a living, evolving institution he has built over two decades of work.

He sculpted his first collection of figurative heads in 2009. By 2013 they were placed in the museum's Sacred Area. Today the installation spans over 3,500 sculptures across 3 continents — Africa, Europe, and America — making it the world's most expansive monument dedicated to victims of the Transatlantic slave trade.

The museum is known for its Griot Learning Program — trained oral historians who guide visitors through the symbolism, spirituality, and philosophy of the sculptures. Six griots have graduated the program since 2019.

The Ancestor Project, the non-profit parent organisation, runs year-round education and youth empowerment programming, using art to foster healing from the legacies of colonialism and enslavement.

Recognition

Awards & Honours

• Kuenyehia Prize for Contemporary Ghanaian Art 2015
• GUBA Award — Most Influential Artist of the Year 2019
• Permanent Commission — Equal Justice Initiative, National Memorial for Peace and Justice & Legacy Museum, Montgomery, AL 2018
• Featured in EPIX documentary series Enslaved, hosted by Samuel L. Jackson 2020
• Lecturer — KNUST, NAFTI, Alliance Française-Accra, Lincoln Community School, Radford University College
• Featured in Yale Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library lecture series 2021

Artist Statement

"Blank is the slate that we write on, but we see through. We see through palimpsest of millions of civil rights placards begging for a chance to breathe… The rights to breathe. I sculpt yes, but the statement is not my own. The statement is for the people. The African American people, the black people. And people who want to speak up against the tradition of injustice. That is why the slate is left blank." — Kwame Akoto-Bamfo