Joe Minter

b. 1943 · Birmingham, Alabama, USA

Beside a Birmingham cemetery, a welder who calls himself the Peacemaker has spent over three decades building four hundred years of African American history out of chains, tools and scrap steel.

The life

Minter was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1943, the eighth of ten children; his father worked as a caretaker at Elmwood Cemetery after segregation shut him out of skilled trades. Minter served in the US Army, then spent years in metal fabrication, construction and vehicle restoration until eye damage from asbestos exposure ended his manual work. Around 1989, as Birmingham planned its civil rights museum, he asked God for a vision and received a mission: to tell the story of the African people brought to America. The African Village in America has been growing around his home ever since.

The work

A quarter-acre of welded figures and monuments made from rusted tools, chains and salvage: hand tools stand in for anonymous labourers, chains for slavery, and installations mark the Middle Passage, the Montgomery bus boycott, the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing and the Selma march. Through the Souls Grown Deep Foundation his work has entered the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Why we love them

A history the textbooks skimmed, built life-size in a yard from the actual iron that did the work. You do not read it, you walk through it.

Go deeper

• Joe Minter at the Outsider Art Fair
• Joe Minter on Wikipedia
• Souls Grown Deep Foundation
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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