Ports and port cities are sites of encounter and exchange, of sea and land, of trade and commerce. In port cities, different cultures jostle against each other and languages mix as the local and global co-mingle to create new ways of life. Ports and their cities are sites of remaking. For hundreds of years, from the 15th-century to the late 19th-century, many ports along the West Coast of Africa were connected to various ports in the Americas, particularly in North America, Brazil and the Caribbean. This was the era of the trade in “human commerce” – the Transatlantic Slave Trade. This trade in over 12 million African human beings became the basis of the wealth of European and American civilizations. Today, we are confronted with a critical issue — how to tell this story. 

This exhibition emerges from the April 23–24, 2026 conference, Reconsidering Port Cities: Critical Commemoration of Slavery, and Transatlantic Legacies, that reimagines port cities. Thus, this exhibition attempts to tell a story about the trade through an exploration of ports. Through artistic interventions, meditations, and creations, port cities are recontextualized, complicated, and reimagined, centering Black and Indigenous experiences within the global history of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its present-day legacies.