Allen AME Church’s art installation remembers South Carolina shooting victims, survivors

Eight months have passed since Pastor Anthony Steele, leader of Tacoma’s Allen African Methodist Episcopal Church, went to work on a Thursday morning and found a man on the doorstep in tears.

The night before, in Charleston, South Carolina, a young man shot nine people to death during a Bible study meeting at the Emanuel AME Church. Steele knew two of the victims personally. He and his fellow AME pastors around the country spoke on a conference call that night, talking about what to do.

Here it was, the next day, and the front door of the Tacoma church was strewn with flowers, candles and grieving onlookers. The sobbing stranger, a white man, asked Steele a question:

“Why?”

It was a call to action of sorts, Steele realized — but what sort of action, in the midst of so much grief?

A day later, after a memorial service and time for spiritual reflection, Steele found his answer: build a monument. And let one word be its center: “Forgive.”

It’s the name of a new installation set for a Saturday unveiling at the church. Conceived in collaboration with artists from Tacoma’s Museum of Glass, the sculpture will be displayed for the first time at 11 a.m., as part of the church’s annual Unity Day celebration.

“I listened to God, and God said, ‘Let’s build something and do something,’” Steele said. “I was thinking of a sculpture.”

New to the region (Steele took charge of the church 14 months ago), he wondered where to find an artist. He followed an impulse, called the museum, and spoke to an artist named Ben Cobb.

“I was talking to him, and I noticed we were talking for five minutes,” Steele remembered. “I said, ‘Wow, he hasn’t said no yet.’”

Cobb never said no, nor did Sarah Gilbert and Gabe Feenan, two fellow artists and museum employees, who devised designs based on suggestions from Steele and other members of the congregation.

The final product blends ideas from all three artists, and two other collaborators from the museum. Nine blue teardrops, representing those who were killed in the shooting, will hang among three hearts, representing those who survived. Below the tears and hearts, a blue pool will ripple out. Amid the tears will be a cross, and Steele’s word: “Forgive.”

The idea, according to Steele, is to move beyond sorrow, to remember those who survived. Two of those survivors, Polly Sheppard and Felicia Sanders, will attend Saturday’s ceremony.

“What’s important about this particular piece is it gets the story right,” Steele said. “Much of what’s reported is the Charleston Nine. There’s more than nine. There were 12 people. What about the life portion of this tragedy? Where’s the victory in this thing? We wanted to make sure it reflected all of it.”

Steele’s idea is redemptive. He wanted the sculpture to move beyond mourning, to preserve the spirit that brought people together in the wake of the shootings, to remember to forgive.

“We can’t just preach about it,” he said. “We have to exemplify it. This is our moment to tell the world that we know how to do this, we as a people, together as a country, we have to get beyond our small, petty issues between us, and because of it, we’re gonna show you that even in this major tragedy, we’re gonna forgive everything — not just the person, but everything around it that caused it.”

Steele said the word, then unconsciously said it again.

“Forgive me for being so churchy, but that’s just the way I am.”

The artists confessed that they’re not so churchy, but they got the message nonetheless. Gilbert saw the idea as an attempt to celebrate the lives of the victims and survivors, and move forward. Feenan knew the cross was integral, an important symbol.

It’s a commission job for the artists, the first memorial to emerge from the museum’s hot shop in its history. Tuesday, Cobb, Feenan and Gilbert supervised a small crew working on the installation in the church lobby.

Cobb flinches a little at the word “artist” as a label. He prefers “maker” when he talks of the work involved. Makers have worked on commission throughout the ages, he said.

“For me, it’s about people,” Cobb said. “It’s about people and how it affects everybody, whether it happened on the East Coast or in your hometown, it has some impact on us. In this case, (the shootings) happened in a place of worship, which by many people’s accounts is one of the worst places for it to happen.”

When Steele speaks at Saturday’s ceremony celebrating the unveiling, he will be joined by other AME pastors, his colleagues from around the country. He will remember his lost friends, the Revs. Clementa Pinckney and Daniel Simmons, who died last June.

Yet he’ll also gesture toward Sheppard and Sanders, the two survivors who will attend the ceremony. And Steele will play a short video from Charleston that means something to him: a crowd reacting to the removal of the Confederate battle flag outside the South Carolina state House a few weeks after the shootings.

The video represents actual change, Steele said — genuine change, not just speeches calling for it.

“In the background, there are black people all around this thing,” he said. “There’s white people, too, but there’s black people around this thing, they’re cheering it coming down. These black people begin to chant, ‘USA, USA,’ because why? Because it is true. We are the United States of America. Not black, not white — that’s what we are, that’s who we are and, when tragedy happens, it’s still all of us. It’s still all of us.”

This story was originally published February 23, 2016 at 12:00 PM with the headline "Allen AME Church’s art installation remembers South Carolina shooting victims, survivors."