Moving Up, 2021

Yinka Shonibare’s installation Moving Up is about the Great Migration – the exodus of six million Black Americans from the rural South to cities in the North, Midwest, and West from 1916 to 1970.

The work consists of three figures carrying their worldly possessions in bags, suitcases, and nets as they climb a grand staircase, a metaphor for their upward movement geographically, economically, and socially. The ornate design of the staircase is based on that found at Chatsworth House in the UK, an Italianate estate that was a longstanding symbol of aristocratic power in Britain. In referencing Chatsworth House, the artist signals the generational wealth held by many of the white employers who figures of the Great Migration would come to work for in the north, and ties that wealth back to British colonialism.

Each figure in the sculpture dons 19th-century attire in the Shonibare’s signature Dutch Wax fabric, which symbolizes the contradictions and complexities of cultural origins. These period costumes allude to the Victorian Era, when the foundations of the sharecropping system and Jim Crow – the source of suppression for Black Americans in the South – were laid.

Moving Up captures the bravery of the Black Americans who refused disenfranchisement by seeking a new place within urban public life in the North and West. The perseverance and self-assertion of this generation shaped the contemporary American socio-economic and cultural landscape.