The Sacred Ground Historical Reclamation Project of the Virginia Defenders for Freedom, Justice &
Equality will host the 20th Annual Gabriel Gathering on Monday, Oct. 10. The event, which is free and
open to the public, will take place from 6:30 to 10 p.m. at the Shockoe Bottom African Burial Ground,
located in downtown Richmond just north of East Broad Street between I-95 and the CSX railroad.
“Each year on Oct. 10, the Sacred Ground Project hosts a community gathering at the African Burial Ground to mark
the date in 1800 when the great slave rebellion leader Gabriel was executed at the town gallows,” said Ana Edwards,
founder and chair of the project. “We gather to honor Gabriel and all those who gave their lives in the cause of
freedom, to celebrate more than 20 years of learning the history of this sacred ground and to rededicate ourselves to
reclaiming and properly memorizing Shockoe Bottom, once the epicenter of the U.S. domestic slave trade. This year
we also are celebrating the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Virginia Defenders for Freedom, Justice &
Equality!”
This year’s commemoration will acknowledge several aspects of the history and future of Shockoe Bottom, with a
common thread: making visible the invisible - three nights of light art, video projections and history presented in
collaboration with the acclaimed artists who famously projected images onto the Lee statue on Monument Avenue
during the Black Lives Matter uprising of 2020. Recontextualizing Richmond will project video images of the history of
Shockoe Bottom, the African Burial Ground, Gabriel’s Rebellion and the community reclamation struggle. The
projections will take place at 7 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 8; Sunday, Oct. 9; and Monday, Oct. 10 on the walls of the
East Broad Street tunnel that connects the African Burial Ground with the Devil’s Half-Acre, once the site of the
notorious jail owned by slave trader Robert Lumpkin.
Also collaborating with this year’s Gabriel Gathering are:
● Richmond artist Sandy Williams IV, also with Recontextualizing Richmond, who will install “Praise Your
Mother,” a neon work that pays homage to the “mothers” who were made invisible to historic events by the
lack of historical reporting. This work was created in collaboration with artist Mariana Parisca and
commissioned by 1708 Gallery in Richmond in partnership with the Virginia Museum of History and Culture
for the exhibition InLight 2020.
● Networked Public Spaces, a research project of the UVA Next Cities Institute, which will bring environmental
issues into visibility through sensors that will light up with changing colors in response to sound and air
particles from the area while a QR code will take the viewer to the data as it is collected.
For more information:
Facebook event page: “20th Anniversary Gabriel Gathering!” - Website: sacredgroundproject.net
Email sacredgroundproject@gmail.com - Phone/Text: 804.644.5834
