Moving Chains Favorite 

Moving Chains is a monumental 110-foot long kinetic sculpture that evokes the hull of a ship, built from steel and Sapele, a tree native to West Africa commonly referred to as African Mahogany. Inside of the sculpture, nine chains run overhead: rotating on a maritime sprocket system, eight of the chains represent the pace of the currents in New York Harbor, while a ninth central chain moves more quickly, mimicking the pace of a ship in transit. The motion and sheer weight of the chains produces a rhythmic, undulating loop, evocative of the lapping water surrounding it. Known as the Hudson River today, Mahicantuck, as it was originally named by the Lenape, means a great waterway in constant motion, or simply translated, “the river that flows two ways.” This waterway would become an economic pillar of the transatlantic slave trade starting during the Dutch and British occupations, and seed the system of racial capitalism foundational to the United States. Facing the Statue of Liberty, an international symbol of freedom, Moving Chains calls attention to the nation’s economic, judicial, and political systems that continue the legacy of slavery today.

Marking the second chapter of the multipart project The American Manifest, Moving Chains furthers Gaines’s examination of the Dred and Harriet Scott decision, a landmark Supreme Court ruling in 1857 that established that no person of African descent, enslaved or free, was eligible for U.S. citizenship. While this decision was reversed in 1868 with the ratification of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, its impact continues to permeate every facet of American political and social life as demonstrated by the continued and systemic subjugation of Black life. Through this series of public works, simultaneously representational and abstract, Gaines continues his long standing interrogation of the logic of systems, creating the possibility to break them open, revealing their dysfunctions and inaccuracies, and to begin to imagine life-affirming structures beyond.