Grinding Souls

Fred Wilson created Grinding Souls at the AMAM in 2016 as part of his exhibition Wildfire Test Pit. Transforming the museum’s central gallery into a vortex of text and object, the installation mined the AMAM’s collection and Oberlin’s history. Wilson challenged the narrative of progressivism and abolitionism so deeply associated with the town and college, beginning with the story of sculptor Edmonia Lewis, who experienced racial violence and discrimination during her time as a student at Oberlin. For the exhibition, he brought together a wide range of works from the AMAM collection and the college archives, putting them in dialogue with assemblages he crafted on site from locally sourced materials.

Wilson transmuted this grindstone, made from sandstone quarried in nearby Amherst, Ohio, into a symbolic representation of slave labor through the addition of ten brass figures, nine of them cramped in the center (reminiscent of the hold of a ship) and the tenth poised outside, literalizing the proverbial expression, “Keep your nose to the grindstone.” The figures, cast brass Asante goldweights used to measure gold dust, invoke the commodification of Black bodies central to the triangular trade, which rendered human chattel equivalent to metal wares, cloth, guns, and other goods.