Eldren M. (“E.M.”) Bailey built an outdoor sculpture garden in his inner-city Atlanta yard filled with concrete monuments that grew directly from his trade as a maker of grave markers. Yet in a decisive break with most African American funerary sculptural traditions, these objects all move with consummate style. True to Bailey’s sense of irony, the figures in the yard are simultaneously embodiments of categories of black urban life—death, entertainment, sex, political deliverance, sports, religion—and parodies of these stereotypes about black urban life.
