Throughout his career, Charles Ginnever sought to create works whose visual complexities belie the relatively simple forms they first suggest. Many of his sculptures are bold, geometric sets of interconnected steel planes that seem to vacillate between flatness and cubic volume as the viewer moves around them. As the artist said during his lifetime, “What happens is, line becomes plane becomes line again. That’s the whole thing of it. It’s always been my intention to make it an all-the-way-around experience.” Ginnever’s sculptures invite the viewer to meditate on the nature of perception, prompting the artist to call his works “monuments of the motions of the mind.”

Fayette: For Charles and Medgar Evers is named for two brothers who were prominent leaders in the United States civil rights movement. Medgar, a World War II veteran and the first Mississippi field officer for the NAACP, was assassinated in 1963. Charles continued his brother’s work and was elected mayor of Fayette, Mississippi, in 1971. Ginnever made this sculpture that same year, contributing to public art’s long tradition of commemorating heroic figures and allying the artist with the aims of social justice.