Joe Minter is best known as the creator of the African Village, an art environment that he began in the late 1980s in Birmingham, Alabama, that is part sculpture garden, part history museum, and part memorial. A few years later Minter began to make pieces that function independently, such as The Dreamer. “The dream catcher represents the thoughts of a human being, thoughts from a faraway time, thoughts of the ancestors,” says Minter. “Our cultural ties are to the ancestral place. Those ties cannot be broken, the ties to our own roots, to our family tree. Martin Luther King was our voice in the wilderness. He was chosen, he called to be our cry.”
