Artists & Works

Houston Conwill American (b. 1947)
Estella Majozo American (b.1949)
Joseph DePace American (b.1954)
American
Station: Chase (1988)
wood, concrete, copper and chrome plating, and bronze
72" x 12 1/2" x 24"

STYLE: Public Art
Multiculturalism

This sculpture is part of the Stations of the Underground Railroad Project. Seven sculptures were completed for Artpark in 1988 as a temporary installation. Later, the sculptures were purchased by the Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University as public sculptures for Niagara County. The seven sculptures have been installed at significant sites throughout the region, with one placed outside the Castellani, and others in front of actual hiding places and symbolic sites in Lewiston, Lockport, Barker, Pekin, Niagara Falls, and Niagara-on-the-Lake. The Stations project commemorates the Underground Railroad movement, both the African-Americans who escaped slavery and the people of the Niagara Region who helped them escape. Each sculpture symbolizes a house.

The sculptures are designed to be "places of rest" complete with an "attic" and a "cellar," the best places to conceal fugitives as they continued on their northward trek. The attic facade is engraved with maps referencing the Niagara River as a passage to freedom. Words such as "Chase" and "Wing" are combined with arrows and "X" marks to emphasize danger or sanctuary. The cellar door is engraved with complex and cryptic codes designed by station masters conductors to guide passengers along the way and to communicate with other conductors. Phrases such as "please forward and oblige", and "no back charges" are transcriptions of actual notes passed between station masters and conductors.

The sculptures were originally installed with actual items, such as reading glasses, a bible, and a compass; however these items no longer exist. These items were symbolic of items of necessity in which the enslaved would carry on their trek. The recessed mirror placed in the center of the front facade is a symbol of the intersection between history in progress and individual lives, (also pertaining to water or anything that casts a reflection). The meaning stems from the notion that all persons, no matter what the time period, are part of a collective whole, and are always connected to the past. It also represents a "watchful eye" or "light in the window", symbolizing a beacon to safety or guarding against possible danger.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Richard Huntington, The Buffalo News, 2/5/93
"This is an unusual project in that it cuts across boundaries between social history and art. It pinpoints the brave actions of historic individuals and gives tangible form to what has in the past been mostly oral history. The sculptures touch on art forms from African to modern America. They are practical, like a historic marker, and poetic, treating the site as both a literal historical place and a symbol for the suffering of the slaves.

The sculptures resemble tall, metal-clad houses about the size of an adult person. A bronze relief with a maplike image is fitted into the facade of the peaked roof, and a sloping projection at the base represents a cellar and its door.

The relief contains map symbols, messages and African pattern symbols. Each sculpture is inscribed at the base with a cryptic message used by the conductors. The Barker station, for instance, begins with "XXX In Rome when the white rabbit hangs high..." The Root House message, on the other hand, starts on a more prosaic note: "By tomorrow evening mail you will receive two volumes of the 'Irrepressible Conflict' bound in black." The "irrepressible conflict" was code for the ongoing struggle wrought by slavery.

Conwill has long used mirrors as symbols for the intersection of history and individual lives. Each station has a mirror set within the house's 'window.' It stares like a watching eye and seem to gather up all the surroundings within its small safe space."

Denise Easterling, Niagara Gazette, 8/6/92
"How profound that the first public 'Stations' installation should take place on the grounds of the first African-American church denomination founded in this country, on the last public grounds before the bridge, right in the African-American community, in testament to the large role African-American churches played in the Underground Railroad movement.
What better start for our children, to see that beacon, to learn of the strength, the determination, the faith and courage of their ancestors, to ensure a better life for themselves and others. What better rallying point for a country that is secretly and not so secretly polarized."