Remember Bimbia

If you were in Newport at all this summer, you might have seen Remember Bimbia, a site-specific outdoor installation in front of Newport’s Redwood Library. Belgian-Cameroonian artist Pascale Marthine Tayou was commissioned to produce the 12-foot high piece, one which alludes to the revolutionary summer of 1968 and also to a port city in Cameroon that trafficked largely in slaves until the mid-nineteenth century. (The Redwood Library was founded with the spoils of Abraham Redwood’s rum operation, one which included hundreds of slaves on a sugar plantation in Antigua.) Tayou has been using brightly colored paving stones in his work since at least 2015, but here they’re piled around a specially planted American flag, a heavy but fleeting symbol of the power of revolt.