From 9 November 2024 to 9 November 2025, the MFA Boston hosts the exhibition “Deep Waters: Four Artists and the Sea”
Supply: Museum of Tremendous Arts (MFA) Boston · Picture: J.M.W. Turner, “Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On),” 1840. MFA Boston
Generations of artists have explored the beauties and terrors of the ocean, reflecting on the experiences of those that have lived and died among the many waves. Weaving collectively artworks by 4 artists remodeled centuries and throughout the Atlantic, this exhibition follows a genealogical thread united by the ocean. Echoes of John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark (1778) reverberate in J. M. W Turner’s 1840 Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Useless and Dying, Hurricane Coming On), which itself has influenced artwork created within the twenty first century.
Introduced right here for the primary time in New England, John Akomfrah’s iconic three-channel movie set up Vertigo Sea (2015) expands on the themes on the coronary heart of the 2 earlier works, exploring humanity’s tumultuous relationship with the ocean and its creatures, and the ocean’s position within the historical past of slavery. In Some Individuals Have Non secular Eyes I and II (2020), photographer Ayana V. Jackson takes these concepts in a brand new path. Jackson’s exploration of divinity, femininity, and future by self-portraiture is impressed by Drexciya, a legendary aquatic utopia populated by descendants of the pregnant African ladies who misplaced their lives within the Atlantic Ocean in the course of the Center Passage.
“Deep Waters: Four Artists and the Sea” invitations guests to contemplate and replicate on the dialog between these artworks and their makers. Every artist gives a novel perspective drawn from their lived expertise, but all are attuned to the poetics and histories of the ocean—from its glittering surfaces and unfathomable depths to its inhabitants and ghosts; from it as a web site of reminiscence, mourning, and fragility to an emblem of resilience and potential futures.
