Charles Gaines: Moving Chains and Mound

Production | Exhibition Grant

Comprising Charles Gaines’ most ambitious public art project to date, Moving Chains and Mound will use the language of monumental sculpture to address Black and Indigenous histories, and to interrogate the paradoxical legacy of American prosperity across the nation. Referencing the slave trade barges that once navigated the American waterways, Moving Chains comprises a long wooden hull that supports ten large, revolving mooring chains connected to pulley systems operating at two different speeds: one mimicking the river’s current, and the other mimicking the pace of barges that sail along it. Passers-by can enter the sculpture’s structure from the riverside to experience the sights and sounds of its rumbling metal. Mound engages histories of trade and commerce, making specific reference to trade between settlers and Native Americans whose ceremonial mounds dotted the landscape. The sculpture’s corn kernel exterior invokes the earliest commodity traded between settlers and Native Americans along the same rivers that later powered the slave economy.