V. Mitch McEwen’s installation Gulf of Reparations builds on R:R (Republica:Reconstructed), a project the architect presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2021 in collaboration with the artist Kristina Kay Robinson. In the United States, Reconstruction refers to the period following the Civil War and the unfinished project of emancipation from slavery. The rebuilding of the South, carried out in part by the Freedmen’s Bureau, the federal agency established to assist formerly enslaved people, was not intended as a return to the status quo ante. Instead, it carried the hope of a new social order, a hope that was thwarted by the racist Jim Crow laws and the terror of the Ku Klux Klan. Echoing W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of Black Reconstruction, McEwen returns to these historic forks in the road and the futures they opened up.
