Curator’s Reception

Thursday, August 22, 2024
5:30 PM  7:30 PM

800 Riverview Drive
Winona, United States

Curated by Tia Simone-Gardner and Shana M. griffin

The Western formation of what has become the Americas was born through water. The metaphorical birth of a nation, nor its often violent formation, is a one time event. It is a process of taking, extracting, and dispossessing. Take — a verb, to lay hold of, to displace things, or people, from where they belong. Nation-building makes property of things, things that were once unpossessable — land, humans, and water. 

A Nation Takes Place looks at the many ways artists draw critical attention to the connection between water and nation, water and sovereignty, and water and reimagined ecologies. We look again at the convention of maritime art with an eye toward the ways that the imaginaries of seafaring are tethered to the lethal technologies of enslavement, colonialism, genocide, dispossession and extraction. 

A Nation Takes Place draws together a transnational collection of artwork , representing a variety of mediums - in an effort to unpack the ways artists help us comprehend the complexity of the United States’ formation, a project unthinkable without waterways, conquest, and slaveships. While the archive, with its limitations, provides some access to the past, there are histories that have been erased, histories that remain inaccessible to language, and histories resistant to being written. In these gaps, the artists in A Nation Takes Place help us to fill in the spaces where words cannot. 

Located near the headwaters of the largest watershed in America, the Minnesota Marine Art Museum (Winona, Minnesota) is an ideal space to stage a project like this. With its commitment to creating meaningful art experiences that explore our relationship with water and organizational responsibility to reframe the portrayal of marine art in ways that give narrative equity to Black and Indigenous Peoples.

Drawing from a mix of historic works and archives from a variety of museum collections, contemporary work courtesy of the artists, some emerging, some established, and some newly commissioned for the exhibition, this project centers on artists, scholars, and communities who have been systemically excluded from narratives, practices, and presentations of American marine art. 

The exhibition project was made possible with support from the Mellon Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Terra Foundation for American Art.  

 The 4,568 square foot exhibition featured in the museum’s signature Manoogian Gallery include 68 works of art by 38 different artists, each placed in one of three different sections of the exhibition -

Ledger

A ledger records transactions. Transactions between land and ocean, manifests of cargo, navigational details and occurrences. Wind directions, hull speeds, deaths, acts of resistance, and the banal mechanisms of accounting on slave vessels are tracked. Here we ask: Where do historical accounts of maritime trade intersect with “American art”?  The Ledger explores the political economy of seafaring and its relationship to the international and domestic slave trade and colonization.

The Wake/The Break

The Wake/The Break asks us to slow down, take a step back. Like jazz, like oceanic rhythms, this section dramatizes intervals of time, breach, and gaps—what Fred Moten terms “a radical breakdown.” It peers into the absences of our inherited marine narratives and returns to us a salty, hydrated excess of the many histories that brought us into this present. Here, artists ask us to consider our place in the changing global climate, and bring us into closer relation with water bodies, and even our bodies as water. This space emphasizes the transformative potential of art to resist, reimagine, and intervene against oppressive structures.

The Deep

Depth is a signifier. In the ocean, depth is symbolic of power, proximity, the unknown, and, at times, fear. The Deep pulls at the body, plucking us away from the safety of the surface, into fluid places where remembering and forgetting are twin capacities. The Deep invites ways of working that press against unjust national myths. Artists bring us back to ideas of the productive power of water, not only as the birthplace of new world nations, but also of new cultural forms and possibilities. 

Exhibiting Artists

Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, Katrina Andry, Radcliffe Bailey,  kai lumumba barrow, Dawoud Bey, Willie Birch, Imani Jacqueline Brown, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Peter Happel Christian, Gordon Coons, Wesley Clark, Allan Rohan Crite, Aaron Douglas, Torkwase Dyson, Sokari Ekine, Claire Foster-Burnett, Shana M. griffin, Monica Moses Haller, Li(sa E.) Harris, Sky Hopinka, Deborah Jack, William Henry Johnson, Jacob Lawrence, Pam Longobardi, Elana Mann, Nicolas Eustache Maurin, Kent Monkman, Edward Moran, Martin Payton, Juan Carlos Quintana, Calida Rawles, Renee Royale, Dread Scott, Dameun Strange, Kara Walker, Wendy S. Walters, Dyani White Hawk,  Fred Wilson. 

Essayists 

Tia-Simone Gardner, Shana M. griffin, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Jessica Marie Johnson, Tiffany King, Katherine McKittrick, Brenda Marie Osbey, Erin Sharkey

Resident Artists

Monica Moses Haller, Elana Mann, Juan Carlos Quintana, Dameun Strange

Commissioned Artists

Kwame Akoto Bambo, Cole Redhorse Taylor