Working in conjunction with Liberty City’s youth and its African Heritage Cultural Arts Center (AHCAC), artist Xavier Cortada is creating Adinkra Project: Grounded in Liberty City to address issues around community cohesion, communal identity, and gentrification. Adinkra, symbols from Ghana that represent deeply symbolic concepts, are a means for “supporting the transmission of a complex and nuanced body of practice and belief.” These symbols cover the façade of the AHCAC, presenting an array of African proverbs in the form of elaborate iconography and providing Cortada with a point of departure for community involvement. Local families will depict Adinkra symbols of their choice on flags and plant them at home alongside native trees. This practice harkens back to the artist’s Native Flags project, launched at the North Pole through the New York Foundation for the Arts, which saw Miami citizens as “reverse conquistadors,” reclaiming urban spaces for nature. Within the context of Cortada’s efforts in Liberty City, the Adinkra symbols offer neighbors a means to display a unified statement of reclamation. By having residents of the community make a collective claim to an area in this way, the Adinkra symbols act as cultural aphorisms, the relevance of which resides in their ability to present the relational identity of a localized population as a ubiquitous part of everyday life.

Cortada’s project, being developed as part of the Socially Engaged Art in Law course (ART315/LAW532) he is co-teaching at the University of Miami School of Law during Spring 2022, focuses on 11 specific Adinkra symbols; the respective symbols representative of core societal values. Take, for example, the Nkonsonkonson symbol, a literal chain link illustrative of community unity and reminder of each individual’s contribution to common wellbeing. The significance of such powerful collective imagery carries exponential resonance through its continued usage across space and time. By having local Liberty City residents plant these symbols within and around their neighborhood, a shared mentality of an “owned” and respected community space is fostered. This theme of communal pride is an intrinsic aspect of the artist’s work, the very process of this project being one of self-empowerment. Importantly, the saplings children plant today will provide the tree canopy for a community they aim to grow, giving shade to their own children a generation from now.

Through Cortada’s residency at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center (part of Oolite Arts’ 2022 Home + Away program), the artist furthered his investigation of the Adinkra symbols within the perspective of a traditional fine art material; bronze. The dichotomy that exists between ephemerality and permanence has long been a part of Cortada’s work, the presumption of art as a living, engaged culture. Bronze’s cultural importance resides in it being a historically significant metal to the development of human civilization. When used in the depiction of the adinkra symbols, the ensuing sculptures appear timeless, seemingly as old as the iconography upon which they are based.