Too Obvious

One might expect to find coins spilling out of this broken piggy bank. Instead, it is filled with white cowrie shells, a precolonial West African currency. Under colonialism, paper money replaced shells as the representation of value. David Hammons’s sculpture appears to reverse this shift, while revealing the history of subjugation of Black and brown laborers in the construction of global capitalism. By transforming everyday objects such as the piggy bank, Hammons evokes overlooked histories of Black Americans in his art.