As St. Mary’s College of Maryland was readying to build a new stadium on campus a few years ago, it first had a hurdle to cross: state law and regulations required the school undergo an archaeological dig of the land.
So, during the summer of 2016, alongside staff and students, Dr. Julia King, professor of anthropology at St. Mary’s, surveyed the area. Uncovering items such as ceramics, bottle glass, animal bones, nails and bricks, the team found evidence of what used to be slave quarters.
After the discovery, Dr. Tuajuanda Jordan, president of St. Mary’s, gathered the community to discuss ways to acknowledge and honor the existence of the slave quarters on campus. This eventually led to the idea of building a commemorative.
“We decided to make a commemorative really speaking to resilience and persistence, celebrating the contributions that enslaved peoples made back during slavery,” said Jordan. “And continuing contributions that the descendants are making here in this area.”
RE:site, a design firm, was chosen to build the “Commemorative to Enslaved Peoples of Southern Maryland.” To understand more about the history and project, designers and co-founders of RE:site, Shane Allbritton and Norman Lee, visited the grounds.
“Our approach to any job we have is to make it as site-specific,” said Allbritton. “We see ourselves as storytellers that line the cultural landscape of a place and try to extract some kind of history or memory or something historical that needs to be revealed. We like to make connections that are typically unseen and express that through the lens of contemporary art.”
