D'Ascenzo Studios
Cotton Field (Broken), 1932
In 2016, this stained-glass panel was broken in an act of protest by Corey Menafee, an African American man who worked in a residential dining hall at Yale University. The painted glass shows two slaves standing in a cotton field with full baskets balanced on their heads. Created in 1932, the image conveys a sanitized version of slavery associated with a romanticized history of the antebellum South. Menafee confronted this representation of enforced labor during his workdays until one day when he decided to stand on a chair and break the glass with his broom handle. His action was not driven by national or local protests, but reflected a response to a work of art that illuminated silent symbolic support for an institutionalized labor system of racial inequity. Label by Kelly Conway