Black Reflections: Thoughts from the Bedrock presents an abstract river sculpture made of scrap aluminum and vinyl fabric—symbolic of the River—alongside a curated constellation of eleven literary, speech, and poetic works that treat rivers as living archives of Black ancestry, livelihood, and memory. The project is inspired by LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photographs Edgar Thompson Plant and the Bottom (2013), Washington Avenue and Monongahela River (2013), and United States Steel Clairton Coke Works, C.I.T.E., and Monongahela River (2013), which document the Monongahela River as an industrial sacrificial zone where environmental degradation, racialized housing, and neglect converge. Frazier’s work grounds rivers not as abstract landscapes, but as sites of intimate exposure—where infrastructure, toxicity, and human life entangle.
The project is equally anchored in the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, whose poetic, political, and philosophical engagements with rivers recur across Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, the prose-poem The Black River, the essay The Flood, the Red Cross and the National Guard published in The Crisis, and his 1930 speech on preservation of the Housatonic River. For Du Bois, rivers function as moral and civic barometers: their neglect reflects social failure, while their restoration gestures toward collective responsibility and repair—positioning rivers as witnesses to society’s ethical depth.
Complementing these writings, the exhibition draws on works by Langston Hughes, Margaret Walker, Toni Morrison, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and lyrics by Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar, all of whom use rivers as analogies for Black history, memory, and contemplation.
Together, these works trace rivers and their bedrock (the deep, hardened rock that sustains the riverbed), as expressive strata—sites where unapologetic and critical Black thought accumulates, settles, and persists.
As part of Hunt’s “Metamorphoses” series, Linear Peregrination, created in 1962, embodies sentiments of forward motion, travel, steps, onwards, and creature. This sculpture appears alive. Perhaps with a head and a tail. A body and its legs. A mind and its will. The three spokes of chromed metal steelwork that touch the floor provide stability and stature. Thin, protruding and intertwined juts of metal propagate from each of the three spokes, forming most of the material basis of the work and three distinct, conjoined segments.
I am reminded of the significance of threes. Wise men. Musketeers. Stooges. Little pigs. Graces. The Pyramids of Giza. Red, blue, and yellow. Rock, paper, scissors. Land, sea, and air. Solid, liquid, gas. Protons, neutrons, and electrons. Length, width, height. x, y , and z. Birth, life, and death. Beginnings, middles, and ends. Scale, speed, and scope. Past, present, and future. The good, the bad, the ugly. Heaven, hell, and earth. The holy trinity. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Poverty, chastity, and obedience. Creation, destruction. And void. *Gasps*. Is this what the trees see?
