Society’s Cage

• Honor Award 2022, 
• Sylvia Harris 2022 

Society’s Cage is a bold interpretive installation that challenges visitors to reckon with America’s long history of racial injustice and white supremacy. With a design rooted in statistical facts, it is at once unsettling and uplifting, a place to raise awareness, build empathy, and provide sanctuary for contemplation and healing.

Agency

Society’s Cage Design Team (CAOS)

Practice Area

• Public Installation 

Client

Dayton Schroeter (self initiated)

Industry

• Urban + Civic 

The approach to this project was to avoid the cliché “feel good” monument designed to produce sentimentality and nostalgia for its own sake. The design team saw this as an opportunity to create an experience that could challenge and empower the visitor with resources and tools to be change agents for racial justice. Society’s Cage takes the ugliness of racism and renders it in a beautiful way to draw people in to have uncomfortable but necessary conversations about racial justice and reconciliation.

Society’s Cage is a grassroots effort born in the aftermath of the Breonna Taylor and George Floyd murders. It is a national traveling art installation designed to contextualize the contemporary phenomenon of police killings of Black Americans within the 400-year history of anti-Black racialized state violence in the United States. It provides an opportunity to acknowledge and reckon with the severity of racial biases inherent in the institutional structures of justice and creates a space for reflection and contemplation.

Part of the pavilion is an imperfect cube that symbolizes unrendered justice for Black Americans where the history of anti-Black state violence erodes the purity of the cube form to create a cavernous void. Only a quarter of the rods reach to the ground, reflecting the grim fact that one in four Black Americans will be incarcerated in their lifetime.

Each facade of the cube embodies a graphic representation of a historic data graph that describes how Black Americans have been impacted by the primary institutional forces of state violence including mass incarceration, civilian killings by police, capital punishment, and lynching. The resulting concept is a 15-foot by 15-foot raised pavilion consisting of nearly 500 suspended weathered steel rods that form a perfect cube, suggesting a fair and equitable societal construct. The steel bars are weathered. Their color resembles the variety of melanin in the Black diaspora, and their texture represents the enduring legacy of institutional racism in America.