Felandus Thames, “Wail on Whalers, a Portrait of Amos Haskins” (2024) (all photographs Aly Thomas/Hyperallergic except in any other case famous)
MYSTIC, Conn. — A momentous exhibition on the Mystic Seaport Museum honors the ancestral information and artistic innovation that circulate from Black and Indigenous communities’ sacred relationship to waterways. Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea takes guests on a journey by centuries of interrelated Black and Indigenous traditions of seafaring and artmaking, revealing oft-ignored histories.
Entwined is housed in Stillman, a Greek Revival-style New England constructing on the museum’s 19-acre campus. Within the foyer on the entrance, sunshine pours in from a window overlooking the Mystic River — itself a waterway stewarded by generations of Black and Indigenous peoples of the “Dawnland” (New England). There, a video and introductory texts body the exhibition as a collaborative endeavor between the museum and neighborhood members, in addition to a celebration of the still-thriving cultures of peoples indigenous to Africa and North America. Maritime narratives of ancestral and descendant voices are on the core of the curatorial crew’s interpretation of the visible and materials tradition on show.
Set up view of Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea (photograph by Joe Michael, courtesy Mystic Seaport Museum)
On the heart of the primary gallery is “Mishoon/Aklo” (2023), a shocking canoe created as a collaboration between 4 artists: Sika Lobby (Togo), Alvin Ashiatey (Ghana), Hartman Deetz (Mashpee Wampanoag), and Gary Carter Jr (Mashantucket Pequot). Carved from tree trunks with hearth and water, “dugout” canoes are a shared custom from Pequot territories to African shores, the place they’re used to navigate rivers and oceans, sustaining communities by fishing and sustaining connections. Close by is the oldest object on view, an Aboriginal cooking pot from 500 BCE produced from shell-tempering know-how utilized in international Indigenous and African ceramics, one other instance of ancestral science that sustains on a regular basis life.
After strolling by two galleries of maritime materials tradition made by expert Black and Indigenous craftspeople, guests arrive at an unlikely area evoking historic home dwellings. The exterior construction is modeled after a standard Wampanoag wetu, a dome-shaped residence produced from native supplies like cedar saplings. Although it’s introduced right here at floor degree, the inside of the wetu is designed to feel and look just like the attic of a colonial-era New England residence, the place enslaved Africans and Indigenous indentured staff have been usually pressured to dwell. The dimly lit show evokes the captivity and loneliness of the attic, whereas the fragmented items of a sacred historic bundle on show allude to the area as a website for privateness and religious apply. The “Nkisi Bundle” (18th century) is a spirited assemblage of cowrie shells, beads, buttons, cloth scraps, and different objects utilized as a vessel to attach Africans to their ancestors. The possible proprietor, enslaved man Cardardo Wanton, would have prayed together with his nkisi bundle in personal to guard him, hiding it beneath an attic floorboard within the meantime. Minkisi, the plural of nkisi, are vessels instilled with power and ancestral spirit in West and Central African traditions. As sacred assemblages, they promote religious concord on the African continent and in diasporic rituals.
Set up view of Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea (photograph by Joe Michael, courtesy Mystic Seaport Museum)
Leaving the intimacy of the provisional attic, the gallery opens as much as a large show of up to date artwork. The Indigenous vogue on view is resplendent: “The Rainbow Regalia” (2016) of Sherenté Mishitashin Harris (Narragansett), Two-Spirit activist and champion powwow dancer, is colourful and vibrant, with intricate beadwork, shimmering fringe, and designs that honor the Fancy Scarf custom. Close by, “Maushop’s Earrings” and “Squant’s Gorget Necklace” have been created from Quahog shells in 2023 by Elizabeth James-Perry (Aquinnah Wampanoag) as a pleasant ode to Maushop and Squant, the highly effective duo in Wampanoag folklore recognized for shaping the shoreline and defending their individuals. James-Perry’s “Constellation Wampum Belt” (2023) is produced from shells woven into the form of the Bear constellation, symbolizing the connection between the earth and the sky. It sits on the up to date finish of a millennia-old custom through which coastal Indigenous communities in New England and elsewhere within the North create purple and white beaded bodily adornments from Quahog shells.
Different up to date beaded and woven works have fun the wonder and resilience of Black and Indigenous lifeways. Felandus Thames’s “Wail on Whalers, a Portrait of Amos Haskins” (2024) is a shocking beaded portrait honoring fugitive slaves who joined the whaling trade. Within the Nineteenth century, Amos Haskins (Wampanoag Tribe of Homosexual Head) achieved captain standing within the whaling trade, the place he labored with a various crowd of sailors, together with escaped enslaved individuals and different individuals of coloration. He married an African-American lady, Elizabeth P. Farmer, in 1844 and raised mixed-race youngsters along with her. Tragically, he was misplaced at sea in 1861, however his legacy lives on for instance of the Nineteenth-century whaling trade, the place Black and Indigenous peoples discovered kinship and monetary autonomy. Adjoining is Nafis M. White’s “TideLine” (2023–24), a wall sculpture produced from colourful hair woven into completely different types, akin to braids, twists, and knots that cascade and coil throughout the work like tidal currents. The work’s medium line consists of “hair, embodied knowledge, ancestral recall, audacity of survival, Swarovski crystals, the artist’s sequined gowns, hair baubles, gold gilded oyster shells, bobby pins” — a pleasant framing of her inventive apply that mirrors the themes of the exhibition, as hair is an ancestral, sacred, artistic course of in each Black and Indigenous communities.
Entwined takes us in numerous instructions throughout a whole bunch of years of Black-Indigenous survival below colonialism and slavery. We witness the visible and materials tradition by which Africans, Natives, and their descendants adorn themselves and specific their cultural traditions, feed their our bodies and spirits, and thrive. That this exhibition takes place in Connecticut and facilities Dawnland (New England) narratives is extremely particular. The state possible conjures photos of White, rich businessmen who work on Wall Road and dwell in suburban Southern Connecticut mansions. Indigeneity has usually been rendered invisible in Connecticut, even because the state hosts the world’s largest museum of Native American historical past and tradition, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Analysis Heart, lower than a 30-minute drive from the Mystic Seaport Museum and from which a number of works have been loaned. Entwined is a profound assertion: Black and Indigenous histories matter right here, too. Globally and domestically, their traditions are sacred, eternal, and entwined.
Unrecorded maker, Aboriginal cooking pot (c. 500 BCE) (photograph Alexandra M. Thomas/Hyperallergic)
Set up view of Nafis M. White, “TideLine,” (2023–24) (photograph Alexandra M. Thomas/Hyperallergic)
View of Mystic River from window in exhibition constructing (photograph Alexandra M. Thomas/Hyperallergic)
Set up view of Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea (photograph by Joe Michael, courtesy Mystic Seaport Museum)
Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea continues on the Mystic Seaport Museum (75 Greenmanville Avenue, Mystic, Connecticut) by April 19, 2026. It was curated by Akeia de Barros Gomes along side an exhibition advisory committee of Black and Indigenous elders, academics, and neighborhood members.
