Image of identity

Toni Scott's installation Tepee, featuring totems of Native American tribes, is to celebrate the cultural richness of the tribes.[Photo by Xu Bocheng/For China Daily]

To honor her European and African decent, Scott calls attention to the brutal history of slavery and victims' infinite sadness - a legacy that persists in its impact.

She wove 500 real photos of African-American slaves to form an 8-meter-long boat that's hung from the ceiling in the main exhibition hall. She collected the photos from the US Library of Congress. Some were taken by slave owners to showcase their "fortunes". Others were taken by scientists for research purposes, Scott says.

She colored the images blue to denote the horrors slaves endured during long ocean journeys and the sufferings they experienced after arriving at their destinations.

Scott's exhibition is the third staged under the Dame Jillian Sackler International Artists Exhibition Program. It was established in 2013 by Jillian Sackler, widow of Arthur M. Sackler (1913-87), the US physician, medicine publisher and collector. Sackler masterminded and sponsored the museum's construction.

Every year, the program brings an artist's solo exhibition related to history, society and culture.

"The program is of educational importance," Jillian Sackler, who presides over the AMS Foundation for the Arts, Sciences and Humanities, tells China Daily.

"It tries to bring very important issues to the contemporary art world. And hopefully the Chinese students can have something meaningful to see, to learn, to disagree or to have some stimulation. I'm not sure how much the viewers, many being students and small children, really know about slavery ... But seeing something visually can have more of an impact than just reading in a book, which one can't quite relate to."