NY Times: ““I’m the conjurer of all my ancestors, 400 years of African people in America,” said Joe Minter, surveying the dense outdoor environment of artworks he has forged from refuse over the past 32 years across his half-acre yard, facing two of the largest African-American cemeteries in the south. Nodding to the tombstones, he added, “they have given me the privilege of being their spokesman.”
Minter described receiving the word of God in 1989 to “pick up what has been thrown away, put it together and put my words on it.” Ever since, the artist, now 78, with a gift for mechanics and previous jobs in construction and auto repair, has been building “African Village in America.” It is a succession of improvised sculptures that bear witness to the history of the diaspora and of civil rights, the contributions of Black people and events shaping the country.
For decades, with his seven-foot-tall talking stick adorned with colorful lanyards and jiggling bells, Minter has led visitors arriving on his doorstep through his cacophonous installation. They have included the art collector Bill Arnett, who was brought there in 1996 by the artist Lonnie Holley, Minter’s friend.
“I call Bill the trailblazer — nobody else took up the sword,” Minter said of Arnett, who died last year. An early champion of work by Black Southern artists including Minter, Holley, Thornton Dial, Purvis Young and quilters in Gee’s Bend, Ala., Arnett created the Souls Grown Deep Foundation in 2010 for his collection of some 1,300 pieces by more than 160 artists and made a landmark gift of 57 of these artworks to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2014 — including Minter’s 1995 anthropomorphic assemblage of shovels, rakes and chains titled “Four Hundred Years of Free Labor.” Since then, through a collection transfer program under the leadership of its president Maxwell Anderson, the foundation has facilitated acquisitions of more than 500 works by underrepresented Black artists in two dozen institutions.”