A Nation Takes Place

The western formation of the Americas was born through water. Facilitated by 15th-century seafaring patterns of imperial rule, conquest, and commerce, the modern landscape and waterways of the United States have been defined in part by racial exclusion and colonial control. A Nation Takes Place explores how artists, specifically American artists, draw attention to the intersections of water, geography, reimagined black ecologies, abolition, and the movements for land back, a movement to return land to Indigenous people. Interrogating and expanding maritime art beyond the traditional scenes of ships at sea, this exhibition includes historical artwork from some of today’s most respected museum collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This work is presented in conversation with contemporary artists who are revisiting our collective understanding of the complexity of the United States’ formation, created by settler colonialism and racial slavery, and unthinkable without waterways, conquest, and slave ships.  

Co-Curated by Tia Simone-Gardner and Shana M. Griffin

Image: Sokari Ekine (b. 1949, English), Liquid, 2023. Photograph