Plateau Strategy
The story
Biddy Mason was born into slavery in 1818 and was taken west with the household that held her. After California entered the Union as a free state, she challenged her illegal enslavement and won freedom in court in 1856. Mason settled in Los Angeles, worked as a nurse and midwife, bought land, supported people in need and helped found the First African Methodist Episcopal Church.
The memorial occupies land near her former homestead. Sheila Levrant de Bretteville’s eighty-foot artwork, Biddy Mason: Time and Place, uses text and impressions of wheels, plants, maps, a midwife’s bag and freedom papers to make biography physical. Read from the northern end and let each object slow the timeline.
This is an outdoor public-art stop rather than a museum with posted admission hours. Keep the passage open. Universal Gallery can research the named artist and work, while the memorial itself remains the primary source in front of you.