From the Burial Ground to the Sky: 25 Years of the ‘Triumph of the Human Spirit’ monument.

A celebration of endurance, rhythm, and liberation in the heart of New York City.

Please join us on October 9, at 10 am at Foley Square in celebration.

WhiteBox proudly honors Dr. Lorenzo Pace and his monumental legacy with From the Burial Ground to the Sky: 25 Years of Triumph of the Human Spirit — a citywide celebration marking a quarter century of one of New York’s most powerful public artworks. Installed at Foley Square, Pace’s soaring granite monument rises from the very soil of the African Burial Ground, a space of ancestral memory transfigured into a testament of resilience and freedom.

At WhiteBox, we continue to honor the intertwined forces of memory, materiality, and meaning. During Black History Month 2024, we presented Lorenzo Pace: African Animism, A Cycle of Life, an exhibition that revealed the profoundly personal and cultural dimensions of Pace’s art, where objects become conduits of ancestral presence and renewal.

As art critic Catherine Amidon wrote in WhiteHot Magazine, “Lorenzo Pace collects, manipulates, marks, and composes fragments of urban life into rhythmic two- and three-dimensional work to convey his family’s, the nation’s, story of bondage and redemption.” Her words echo through all of Pace’s practice — a rhythm of endurance, reclamation, and spiritual ascent.

We invite our community to join this civic and spiritual commemoration, featuring speakers, including Laurie Cumbo, Commissioner of Cultural Affairs, alongside performances by singers, dancers, drummers, and distinguished guests. Together, we honor not only a masterwork of public art, but a living continuum of history — one that insists, even now, that the human spirit triumphs.

Lorenzo Pace, Juan Puntes, Peter Wayne Lewis and Yohanna M Roa

at Lorenzo Pace solo exhibition at WhiteBox, 2024

Curated by Peter Wayne Lewis and Yohanna M Roa