Childhood Interrupted

Childhood Interrupted is an immersive public art installation that centers the lives and humanity of enslaved children. Through life-sized silhouettes, historical signange interpretation, and imagined moments grounded in the realities of enslavement, the installation asks viewers to consider something history too often overlooks: What did it mean to be a child while enslaved?

The silhouettes depict children reading, playing games, braiding hair, making music, building, dreaming, caring for one another, and finding moments of joy. Other figures confront the harsher realities of their lives, including forced labor, family separation, the denial of education, and the constant knowledge that their bodies and futures were not their own.

Childhood Interrupted does not attempt to recreate individual lives where the historical record is silent. Instead, it creates space to imagine the fullness of childhood that every enslaved child deserved.

They were enslaved, but enslavement was not the entirety of who they were. They were children. They played. They learned. They imagined. They loved. They dreamed.

Childhood Interrupted asks us not only to remember what was done to them, but to remember their humanity.