Stephen Hayes: Cash Crop exhibition catalog

Stephen Hayes’ Cash Crop is an uncompromising tableau featuring life-size sculptures of human figures bound in the chains and metal of the Atlantic slave trade. A powerful and defiant body of work, Cash Crop seeks to create a connection between human rights violations of the past and the present. The core sculptures are inspired by the infamous diagram of the Brookes slave ship, which laid out how enslaved people were placed with minimal space between them in the bowels of the ship, many of them dying along the way. Hayes’ 15 chained figures represent the millions of men, women and children who endured the Middle Passage. In Cash Crop, the bodies of men, women, and children are shackled at the neck, waist, arms, and legs and fixed to a wooden board. Each board bears its own chains, which spiderweb together, binding the group. On the back of the boards are intricately carved diagrams referencing the Brookes slave ship layout. Both the composition and title speak to the ways in which the history and prosperity of the contemporary United States are wed to this atrocity.