“I see myself as of the Middle Passage,” said artist kai lumumba barrow, during a discussion at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum last Saturday, for the opening weekend celebration of “A Nation Takes Place.” The exhibition uses a lens of contemporary Black and Indigenous art to examine the U.S.’s foundational history of racialized slavery, genocide and colonialism in the context of images of the sea. In a lunch series conversation, Black abolitionist artist lumumba barrow reflected that she identifies as coming from the water. “We were created in the water,” she said.
“We are actually a new people, and with that, we have the capacity to do what I like to think of as prefigurative politics,” she said. “We are constructing the worlds we want as we are taking down the worlds that are damaging and harmful, and that’s an ongoing process.”
In “Notes on Insurrection: Middle Passage (2024),” lumumba barrow constructs a surrealist ship made of up-cycled wood and metal, with assorted barge wood, iron gates, sand and bricks. It’s based on the Creole Rebellion of 1841, when 128 enslaved people aboard a ship called Creole successfully revolted while on board, and were ruled by British officials to be free after their arrival in Nassau, in the Bahamas.
kai lumumba barrow: “Notes on Insurrection, Middle Passage,” 2024 Credit: MinnPost photo by Sheila Regan
The piece is sparse-looking and ghostly. It has the look of a shipwreck, or perhaps a raft. In the work, the artist captures the moment of freedom for the victorious slaves, floating toward freedom after an abolitionist battle.
“In thinking about maritime art, it occurred to me that anytime we see Africans in rebellion, they’re often being shot and killed, and there’s blood and the colonial are the victorious,” lumumba barrow said during a tour of the exhibition. “So I’m thinking about those who fought back and those who were successful.”
Curated by Minnesota-based curator Tia-Simone Gardner and New Orleans- based scholar and artist and researcher Shana M. griffin, “A Nation Takes Place” is one of a number of exhibitions coming out in recent years that re-think maritime art in the context of America’s violent legacies. In her catalog essay, griffin cites several other museums across the country that are “offering new lexicons, approaches, and registers for engaging in marine art.” Among them, she wrote, is an exhibition called “Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea,” that opened this year at the Mystic Seaport Museum, in Connecticut. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts has also followed this path in a solo exhibition featuring Dawoud Bey. There was also an exhibition co-organized by the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts and Crystal Bridges in Arkansas in 2021 called “In American Waters,” that grappled with the notion of American Art, using the sea as a way of reflecting on American culture.
Edward Moran (American, 1829–1901): “Galleon at Sunset” Credit: MinnPost photo by Sheila Regan
“A Nation Takes Place” features a few examples of historical paintings and maps— as well as an example of historic slave shackles, but the main thrust of the show features Black and Indigenous artists mining water for meaning. Works in the show unearth legacies of violence and trauma, of land theft, and relationship to the ocean, as well as lakes and rivers. Artists reflect on untold stories and search for connection as well as build new visions for understanding and the future. With 38 artists represented and put together in collaboration with 21 lending institutions, “A Nation Takes Place” is an ambitious project that is as much about looking back as it is about the present moment. It has a beautiful accompanying catalog, “A Nation Takes Place: Navigating Race and Water in Contemporary Art,” published by the University of Minnesota Press.
The exhibition features a number of widely celebrated contemporary American artists like Kara Walker, whose masterpiece film, “8 Possible Beginnings or The Creation of African-America,” (2005) is included along with the pop-up book “Freedom: A Fable” (1997).
There’s also three works by Kent Monkman, who belongs to the Fisher River Band in northern Manitoba and is of Swampy Cree descent. Monkman paints satirically in an Old Masters style. Among the paintings is a piece called “Saving the Newcomers,” (2023), depicting a group of Indigenous people helping settlers, a conquistador, a Viking, a Black person, and various other Europeans, onto a large rock in the ocean. Monkman uses a Hudson River School painting, “Seal Rock” (c. 1872) by Albert Bierstadt, as a basis for the backdrop.
Another Native artist in the show, Gordon Coons, a member of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, takes on treaties in his relief print, “We Cannot Be Redacted” (2019). Taking the shape of an American Flag, the piece lists the names of various treaties alternating with the lands Ojibwe tribes ceded with each treaty, like the “1837 Pine Tree Treaty,” which opened up 4 million acres of dense pine forest to logging, and the “1842 Copper Treaty.” The final line reads “May 20, 1991.” On that date, Coons explained to me, the U.S. courts “re-established our hunting, fishing, and gathering rights off the ceded lands,” he said.
Gordon Coons: “We Cannot Be Redacted” (2019) Credit: MinnPost photo by Sheila Regan
There are moments of terror represented in the exhibition, like Kwame Akoto-Bamfo’s “Nkyinkyim: Insisu,” (2024), a sacred funerary portrait/sculpture that captures the transatlantic slave trade. In the piece, a female figure is shown covered in blood, her neck ensnared with a horrific weapon, while two busts of young men look toward her. It’s a shocking image, and yet it captures a tenderness in its family scene. The piece gives faces to the 15 million enslaved people in America’s most shameful history.
Katrina Andry also addresses shocking images from the slavery era, with a fantastical bent. In works like “The Promise of the Rainbow Never Came,” (2018), the artist shows a figure thrown into the water, as their body transforms into a sea creature. Rainbow colored teardrops cascade upon the person, in an image that is both painful and sublime.
Katrina Andry: “The Promise of the Rainbow Never Comes” (2018) Credit: MinnPost photo by Sheila Regan
Fred Wilson’s “Drips and Drabs,” (2009), meanwhile, made of shiny black blown glass made to look like giant tears dripping down the museum wall and puddling on the floor, expresses deep sadness and also is suggestive of the culpability of museum’s themselves in propagating harmful narratives.
Fred Wilson: “Drips and Drabs” (2009) Credit: MinnPost photo by Sheila Regan
Other artists in the exhibit explore relationships with water in the present tense. Renee Royale collected water from lake Michigan over the course of two months in “Rituals of Belonging.” Gathering the water in mason jars, Royale then dipped polaroids taken from the shore into the jar for 28 days, which she displays on a wall in the shape of a fish. Each photograph reflects not only Royale’s viewpoint of the lake through photography, but also a record of the water itself, through its chemical mingling with the photographic chemicals.
Renee Royale: “Rituals of Belonging” (2023) Credit: MinnPost photo by Sheila Regan
Speaking last weekend, Royale said she began the project while in Chicago when she was feeling displaced, and yearned for a sense of belonging as someone who is a first generation American whose family hails from the Caribbean. “I decided to acclaim myself in the city by visiting the water,” she said.
The work documents a passage of time, and it also nods to a notion of community by the way she groups the specimens and photographs in fish formation. It’s an innovative, deeply personal work, and a great example of a new kind of water art.
If you are reading this and you live in the Twin Cities, you might be thinking, this looks cool but Winona is two hours away! Yes, this is true. But if you can’t do that drive and back in one day, there are lots of affordable hotels in the college town or if you’re an outdoor person, there are several options for camping. For my recent trip, I booked a campsite at the gorgeous Great River Bluffs State Park for $23 plus $8 for parking. If you go, you’ll also have a chance to see a lovely solo exhibition featuring Judy Onofrio’s sculptures and wall hangings, and the fantastical ancient world-inspired paintings of Kajahl, among other works. If you’ve been wondering when a good time might be to visit MMAM, now is the time.
“A Nation Takes Place,” runs through March 2, 2024 ($10). More information here.
Sheila Regan
Sheila Regan is a Twin Cities-based arts journalist. She writes MinnPost’s twice-weekly Artscape column. She can be reached at [email protected].
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Publish date : 2024-08-26 13:00:00
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