![Cameron Rowland, Depreciation, 2018. Restrictive covenant; 1 acre on Edisto Island, South Carolina
40 acres and a mule as reparations for slavery originates in General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Special Field Orders No. 15, issued on January 16, 1865. Sherman’s Field Order 15 was issued out of concern for a potential uprising of the thousands of ex-slaves who were following his army by the time it arrived in Savannah.[1]
The field order stipulated that “The islands from Charleston south, the abandoned rice fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the Saint Johns River, Florida, are reserved and set apart for the settlement of the negroes now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States. Each family shall have a plot of not more than forty acres of tillable ground.”[2]
This was followed by the formation of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands in March 1865. In the months immediately following the issue of the field orders, approximately 40,000 former slaves settled in the area designated by Sherman on the basis of possessory title.[3] 10,000 of these former slaves were settled on Edisto Island, South Carolina.[4]
In 1866, following Lincoln’s assassination, President Andrew Johnson effectively rescinded Field Order 15 by ordering these lands be returned to their previous Confederate owners.
Former slaves were given the option to work for their former masters as sharecroppers or be evicted. If evicted, former slaves could be arrested for homelessness under vagrancy clauses of the Black Codes. Those who refused to leave and refused to sign sharecrop contracts were threatened with arrest.
Although restoration of the land to the previous Confederate owners was slowed in some cases by court challenges filed by ex-slaves, nearly all the land settled was returned by the 1870s. As Eric Foner writes, “Johnson had in effect abrogated the Confiscation Act and unilaterally amended the law creating the [Freedmen’s] Bureau. The idea of a Freedmen’s Bureau actively promoting black landownership had come to an abrupt end.”[5] The Freedmen’s Bureau agents became primary proponents of labor contracts inducting former slaves into the sharecropping system.[6]
Among the lands that were repossessed in 1866 by former Confederate owners was the Maxcy Place plantation. “A group of freed people were at Maxcy Place in January 1866 …The people contracted to work for the proprietor, but no contract or list of names has been found.”[7]
The one-acre piece of land at 8060 Maxie Road, Edisto Island, South Carolina, was part of the Maxcy Place plantation. This land was purchased at market value on August 6, 2018, by 8060 Maxie Road, Inc., a nonprofit company formed for the sole purpose of buying this land and recording a restrictive covenant on its use. This covenant has as its explicit purpose the restriction of all development and use of the property by the owner.
The property is now appraised at $0. By rendering it legally unusable, this restrictive covenant eliminates the market value of the land. These restrictions run with the land, regardless of the owner. As such, they will last indefinitely.
As reparation, this covenant asks how land might exist outside of the legal-economic regime of property that was instituted by slavery and colonization. Rather than redistributing the property, the restriction imposed on 8060 Maxie Road’s status as valuable and transactable real estate asserts antagonism to the regime of property as a means of reparation.
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[1] Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877, updated ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1988; New York: HarperCollins, 2014), 71.
[2] Headquarters Military Division of the Mississippi, Special Field Orders No. 15 (1865).
[3] Foner, Reconstruction, 71.
[4] Charles Spencer, Edisto Island 1861 to 2006: Ruin, Recovery and Rebirth (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2008), 87.
[5] Foner, Reconstruction, 161.
[6] Foner, 161.
[7] Spencer, 95.](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/cxgd3urn/production/f4d43611638ff8d4f0c350dff1ef1c072249feb6-2000x1949.jpg?rect=0,0,2000,1948&w=1200&h=1169&fit=crop&auto=format)
The Dia Art Foundation, which manages several major Land art works across the United States and Germany, is adding a new locale to this small constellation of site-specific projects. The organisation announced today that it will care for Depreciation (2018), a multilayered work by the artist Cameron Rowland that challenges, among others, ideas of property, ownership and value—issues that have increasingly concerned Dia amid contemporary conversations about settler colonialism, reparations, climate change and land extraction.
First presented in Rowland’s 2018 exhibition D37 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Depreciation concerns not simply a physical stretch of land, as is typical of Land art, but rather the legal status of land. Materially, the work consists of a set of documents that describes and defines the legal status of a property that Rowland purchased in 2018, on Edisto Island in South Carolina. Now overgrown, the one-acre plot carries histories of enslavement and dispossession: it was part of a plantation included in lands that the federal government ordered for redistribution, in 1865, to formerly enslaved people—what soon became the broken promise of “40 acres and a mule”. In 1866, after president Andrew Johnson rescinded the order, the plantation was repossessed by former Confederate owners.
When Rowland purchased the property, the artist placed a restrictive covenant on its use to prevent any future development of the land; its appraised value is now $0. The paperwork detailing this is intended for exhibition, and will be on view at Dia Chelsea later this month. However, the property itself is not intended for visitation.
“What I find really provocative and productive about this work is that it poses the question as to where the work itself exists,” says Jordan Carter, a curator at Dia. “That troubling of those notions of visitation, and where the artwork experience is, is an exciting and generative aspect of such a radical proposition. It calls into question the way in which we position ourselves in relation to these artworks.”
Depreciation, notably, is not an acquisition, nor is it rented to Dia, as Rowland often chooses to transfer their work to collecting parties. Rather, Dia will jointly steward it with a nonprofit run by the artist, 8060 Maxie Road, named for the address of the property. That means the institution will maintain the property—namely, covering associated fees and expenses—and store, exhibit and lend the components of the work intended for exhibition. This particular contract is intended to conserve the work’s nontransactional underpinnings, which wrestle with ideas fundamental to Rowland’s practice: the circulation of things deemed capital, conditions of ownership and the pervasive system of racial capitalism itself.
“The work challenges the regime of property—not only technically in the terms of the status of the land, but also symbolically at the level of art,” says Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, associate curator at Dia.
Dia’s decision to co-steward Depreciation also marks an uncommon move for the foundation, which oversees only eight other site-specific works. Rowland’s piece represents the first new site that Dia has announced since 2018, when it acquired Sun Tunnels (1973-76) by Nancy Holt—its first piece of Land art by a woman. Before that, Dia had not announced a new site since the 1999 gift of Spiral Jetty from Robert Smithson’s estate.
Contextualising Depreciation as a Dia site raises critical questions, in particular around land rights, control and art tourism. “What does it make us see of the sites that Dia has maintained over the past 50 years?” says Matilde Guidelli-Guidi. Dia owns certain artworks, but not the land they sit on, as in the case of Spiral Jetty; works like Sun Tunnels and Max Neuhaus’s Times Square (1977) are maintained in collaboration with other organisations. “We’re thinking around how we can open these conversations up even further with Indigenous partners and communities,” Carter says. “We want to share agency as we think on how to steward these sites.”
Dia is also developing a new commission with Rowland, who has been exploring its archives and history of real-estate transactions. “It is an extension of his ongoing investigations into property and new modes of thinking through reparations,” Carter says. The project will premiere at Dia Beacon in spring 2024.