Powerful installation on slavery marks African American Museum's new rigor

No punches are pulled on the top floor of the African American Museum in Philadelphia. No blinking. No turning away.

Greeting the visitor are 15 life-size cement figures shackled together. Bits of twine, fabric, and stick weave through their stony skin. Men, women, and children are bound together, chained to a wooden pallet - goods ready for shipment.

Visitors can wander through the silence of sculptor Stephen Hayes' installation, Cash Crop, listening to the unspoken but very visible history of slavery filling the gallery.

On the south side of the room, a large window looks across Arch Street directly at the Federal Detention Center. A translucent image of black prison workers sewing uniforms for the military is spread partway across the window forming an additional installation, The View From Here: Production, by an anonymous artist calling himself Avtomat Kalashnikova. That would be AK-47.

"So powerful," said M. Claire Lomax, vice chair of the museum's board. "It is kind of radical . . . It's American history."

There is much more related to Hayes' widely admired Cash Crop, on view until Jan. 5, the latest example of the oft-troubled museum's effort to steady its operations and sharpen its focus.

Since the virtual elimination of $400,000 in state funding in recent years, the museum has shed a third of its staff, tightened its budget, mapped a sustainable operating and funding plan, sought to diversify its audience, and worked to put together substantive and challenging exhibitions.

"We haven't compromised our product," said Patricia Wilson Aden, head of the museum since July 2013. "We haven't compromised the offering that we present to the public at all. In fact, I think we've stepped up our game in many ways."

The museum now has 16 staff members (down from two dozen) and is seeking to fund more. The operating budget runs about $1.8 million, Aden said, with $400,000 from the city (the city established the museum during the 1976 Bicentennial), both up slightly from a decade ago.

"Our expenses have been brought in line with the new normal of current funding," Aden said. "We continue to operate with a balanced budget and have not faced a budgetary crisis. We have adopted a very conservative approach, wherein our revenue projections are based upon confirmed grants and donations and firmly established historical trends."

Board chairman Harold Epps said, "We're not going to get ahead of ourselves. . . . You can't invest what you don't have."

The museum is now in the "quiet phase" of a fund-raising drive, not to raise money for construction but to pay for critical staffing positions, programs, and an ever-elusive endowment.

"It is a campaign that we hope will allow us to connect with individuals around this city who care about culture in general, not just African American culture, and who understand how the story of African American history and culture fits into the broader scope, the broader presentation of what Philadelphia offers to the public," Aden said.

Lomax, head of the Lomax Family Foundation, is steering the campaign. The museum, she said, is stable, but needs development staff and program support and, ultimately, endowment funds. "Don't look at this as raising money for operations," she said. "We are already building the budget around what we know we have now."

With attendance at about 75,000 annually, the museum faces another financial challenge: The Philadelphia School District lacks money to bus students there regularly. Aden said money is sought for that as well.

"We are trying to find ways to subsidize that, through corporate support, through foundation support, make it easier for those teachers within the Philadelphia School District who want to continue to bring their kids here," she said. "We are seeing visitorship from the outlying suburbs . . . from Jersey and New Castle County [Del.]. We want to be sure that we continue to serve the Philadelphia community as well."

Perhaps key to all this is programming. The museum has sought to amplify the impact of individual exhibitions with related programs and events. Cash Crop is a case in point.

In addition to The View From Here, the museum has augmented Hayes' installation by displaying shackles on loan from the Lest We Forget Black Holocaust Museum of Slavery in Port Richmond and 18th-century slave dockets on loan from the Delaware County Bar Association. Visitors can view a video of The Crossing, part of choreographer Dario Moore's Sacred Slave Stories, shown in the gallery near Hayes' figures.

An array of public programs emphasizes Hayes' effort to tie the transatlantic slave trade to contemporary production of consumer goods in Third World sweatshops.

Hayes, 33, who lives and works in North Carolina, has been to the museum twice in recent weeks to discuss the installation and its themes, most recently Saturday.

Tuesday at 7 p.m., in conjunction with Moonstone Arts Center, the museum will host a panel of scholars and activists, "Slavery in the 21st Century: Sex Trafficking, Labor Trafficking, and Prison Labor."

Schoolteachers and educators will be invited in on Wednesday afternoon and evening to discuss Cash Crop and the museum's permanent exhibition, "Audacious Freedom: African Americans in Philadelphia 1776 to 1876." Other efforts are in the works, including joint sessions with Eastern State Penitentiary and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Philadelphia sculptor Syd Carpenter, whose works inspired by a 2012 visit to black farms in the South were on view before Cash Crop, said the gallery "was always really lively" during her exhibition. The museum also showed John Ficara's photographs of black farms. In Ficara's view, black farmers are becoming extinct; for Carpenter, a serious gardener, the landscape of black agriculture is changing. The museum, she said, "did an excellent job of exposing the exhibition to a wide variety of populations."

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