Explore the Description of this artwork, Amistad Memorial (New Haven).
The memorial is located in front of New Haven City Hall, which sits on the site where the Amistad captives were held during their trial. Each of the three sides of the memorial depicts Joseph Cinqué:  on the first side, in his native clothing in Africa, on the second side, in court during his trials, and on the third side, after he won his freedom. The monument has a fourth side, facing up, which is only visible from the upper floors of City Hall. It depicts a face and hands in water. Laura Macaluso, in her book, "Art of the Amistad and the Portrait of Cinque" claims that this fourth side could represent slaves drowning along the Middle Passage. Its artist, Ed Hamilton comments on the meaning of the top side on his website: The top of the Memorial is a result of the emotional level of my personal experiences researching for information about slave trading.  From the second floor of City Hall you look down and contemplate this final view of the Memorial.  Could this be our brother, Foone, who drowned in the Farmington Canal?  Or, you could say that this figure, awash in the vastness of an ocean, represents the souls of the many Africans who did not finish their journey of the Middle Passage.  I will let you, as viewer, debate the meaning of this journey.
For the memorial, Hamilton employed a technique known as relief in which the foreground image juts out from the background. Each side demonstrates both high relief (where the projection from the background is much greater than low relief) and low relief to display secondary objects, including the faces of other captives and abolitionists. The three portraits of Cinqué are sculpted in high relief.
New Haven City Hall Joseph Cinqué Middle Passage relief New Haven Ed Hamilton