Freedom Cornerstone

Artist RADCLIFFE BAILEY has been selected to design and fabricate the Freedom Cornerstone located at the corner of Murrow and Gate City Blvd. on the Downtown Greenway.

Radcliffe is a painter, sculptor, and mixed media artist from Atlanta, Georgia who brings an international reputation to the project and a history of telling stories of African American history and culture.  

A Conversation with Radcliffe Bailey and Ayla Amon was held on August 24th.  Radcliffe shared his vision as an artist and what freedom means to him.  Click here to watch the webinar.

Click here to view Radcliffe’s plans for the Freedom Cornerstone. Sketches of his design are below. Read the press release here.

Click here to listen to a recent segment with Radcliffe Bailey and Adron McCann with WABE-90.1FM Atlanta’s hub for culture, news and conversation. A HBO documentary called Black Art: In the Absence of Art featured Radcliffe and his work.  Click here to watch.

Radcliffe Bailey from Atlanta, Georgia, brings an international reputation to the project and a history of telling stories of African American history and culture.  His work is in the collections of many institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; Ford Foundation, New York City; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Philadelphia; Nelson-Adkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Denver Art Museum, Denver Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach; Mint Museum, Charlotte; Nasher Museum at Duke University, Durham; and the Weatherspooon Art Museum at UNCG, Greensboro. Radcliffe’s most recent work has been installed at the newly expanded Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and is titled From the Cabinet.

Ayla Amon is a contract Curatorial Assistant at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and Visiting Lecturer at University of North Carolina Greensboro. She holds degrees in Islamic Art and Architecture, Middle Eastern Studies, and Museum Studies from the University of Chicago and George Washington University, and has worked at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Walters Art Museum, and the Tangier American Legation Museum in Morocco. Ayla studies the African Muslim Diaspora, specifically tracing the cultural and spiritual legacies of the enslaved African Muslims in North America.

This fourth and final Cornerstone commission is the Freedom Cornerstone. The theme of “Freedom” is inspired by the City’s role in the Civil Rights Movement, especially the non-violent protests of the pivotal 1960 Greensboro lunch-counter sit-ins that served as a catalyst to the larger movement. Racial justice and equity have played an important role in shaping our city and defining its identity. The selected artist is asked to explore this history as well as consider what Freedom means today as they conceive of a vision for the artwork. The site for this Cornerstone is located in the southeast corner of the Downtown Greenway’s four-mile loop – at the northeast corner of the intersection of Murrow Blvd and East Gate City Boulevard, Greensboro, NC 27401, a highly visible location that has been created with the realignment of the intersection as Downtown Greenway construction is underway.

Click here to read the article in the News & Record by Dawn Kane on August 19, 2020.

Click here for samples of Radcliffe’s work.