The platform holds ten thousand boxes. These boxes represent the ten thousand works that comprise the collection of the Gibbes Museum of Art, largely society portraits, landscapes, and miniatures. Interspersed among the white boxes are forty black ones. These signify the only works in the collection created by African Americans, works which were acquired recently or entered the collection accidentally. The boxes are laid out as a rough timeline based on the museum's years of operation, and when particular pieces by African-Americans were added. The end of the platform close to the pink columns is the beginning of the timeline and the other end concludes with the four pieces by African Americans which were added to the collection in 2008. The veiled box refers to the first work (in 1943) by an African American artist to become part of the Gibbes' collection: Claude Clark's Old Swede's Church, 1940. Only long after its accession did it become known that its printmaker was African American. The stacked rows of small black boxes that support the platform suggest the unacknowledged role of African Americans in upholding this culture and sustaining its economic structure.