“Deep Waters: Four Artists and the Sea” and more at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston
At Black Maple, we absolutely understand, salute, and support Canadian resolutions to steer clear of the USA until further notice. However, for those Canucks already south of the border (almost 1 million), life continues as we negotiate the new “normal” of Canada-US relations. And because art never sleeps, we continue our quest for visual literacy and cultural engagement that is at the heart of critical thinking and protest. As such, if Massachusetts is on your to do list, there are several things worth seeing at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.
Step into the third-floor gallery off the grand courtyard at the majestic Museum of Fine Arts Boston and you’ll be greeted by three artworks in the temporary exhibition, Deep Waters: Four Artists and the Sea. Directly behind the glass doors and mounted to the left of the introductory panel is John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark (1778). This huge melodramatic painting (it’s around 6 feet x 7.5 feet) depicting the moments before a fearsome shark attacked the fourteen-year-old Brook Watson in Havana Habour, features the vulnerable and flailing Watson in the water and naked as he outstretches his right hand toward the crew of nine men who frantically try to save him. While a white man stands with knee bent on the side of the small boat actively thrusting a metal-pronged boat hook towards the shark’s body, behind him, the sole black male figure holds the rope that has already been tossed in the water towards the desperate Watson. If it is not immediately clear, the sympathetic rendering of a black man as just a regular part of the crew, was extraordinary for this eighteenth-century moment. Much more abundant were images of black men (and women) as groveling, caricatured, demeaned subjects whose presence was intended to conjure gaiety or pity. Copley’s black man does neither. Rather, positioned in the heart of the action, he is, alongside the spear-thrusting white crew member and two other white men who lean over the side of the boat towards Watson with hands extended, a central sympathetic character who is equally engaged in saving the white boy’s life.
John Singleton Copley, Watson and the Shark (1778)
As the introductory panel of the exhibition explains, the show aims to juxtapose four iconic artworks which “explore the beauty and terror of the ocean, reflecting on the experiences of those who lived and lost their lives among the waves.” Highlighting the terror of the sea is another striking work that perplexed and shocked nineteenth-century audiences when Joseph Mallord William Turner first displayed it. In a world where history paintings were often about the gallant acts of white men and genre studies (images of human activity) often highlighted benign aspects of everyday life (like a market scene), Turner instead painted a roiling ocean seemingly consuming the disposed bodies of enslaved Africans who had been tossed from a doomed slave ship. The sea seems to angrily disgorge the limbs of shackled and helpless enslaved people who are swarmed by monstrous looking fish. If you are wondering what the point of such a horrific depiction was, Turner’s lengthy title is helpful. Named Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming on) [1840], Turner intended to create a graphic representation of the Middle Passage, as an undeniable condemnation of the inhumanity of Transatlantic Slavery.
J. M. W. Turner, Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming on) [1840]
On the third wall of the gallery is the contemporary artist Ayanna V. Jackson’s large diptych entitled Some people have spiritual eyes I and II (both 2020). In these beautiful self-portraits created in South Africa, the artist imagines herself as the inhabitant of Drexciya, a product of an Afrofuturist imagining of an underwater kingdom populated by the children of pregnant African women who died during the horrific Atlantic voyages known as the Middle Passage. Reduced to cargo onboard slave ships and chattel once disembarked in the Americas, Jackson condemns the economic exchange of enslaved Africans by wearing a beautiful and elaborately detailed, long dress made of Ghanaian currency. She is also veiled like a bride. Poignantly, the two large portraits match except for Jackson’s pose. In one, she faces the ocean, perhaps recalling the unmarked grave from whence she has (re)emerged, both hands raised with palms facing the water. Is this gesture a sign of duress (don’t shoot), surrender, or something else entirely? In the other portrait, she faces the viewer, head turned to the right, but with a piercing gaze aimed directly at the audience. Her gaze is weary, skeptical, and knowing. She understands her ancestral history and the horrors she/we/they have somehow survived; one of which is the Middle Passage as imagined by Turner on the opposite gallery wall.
Ayanna V. Jackson, Some people have spiritual eyes I and II (both 2020)
The final contemporary art piece is John Akomfrah’s HD, colour, three-channel video installation (48 minutes, 30 seconds). The work is installed alone in a large gallery behind the space in which the other three works are hung. Akomfrah enmeshes the imagery of several key oceanic themes: The Middle Passage; practices of rendition in Argentina; and animal cruelty. All three also wed histories of extraordinary barbarity, human indecency, obscene power, and epic greed. In a darkened room, the large screens are filled with videos of landscape images of towering snowcapped mountains, violently churning ocean water, and underwater scenes. The mountains are awesome, but not evocative of peace since they splinter with avalanches that send huge banks of snow and ice careening downward. The ocean, above and below, too is not securely peaceful. While majestic whales travel with their young in pods, the film then splices historical documentary footage of whaling vessels and their crews, mercilessly harpooning whales, hauling them aboard, ships, and dissecting their bodies. Similarly, polar bears, deer, and seals become targets of man’s need to acquire fur, pelts, and trophies.
Like Turner’s historical painting, Akomfrah also represents the cost of the Middle Passage. White slave ship crew members cast living enslaved people overboard into the Atlantic and other scenes show their dead, almost naked bodies washed up on a beach. This is the human toll of white greed, the price of reducing people to things, and humans to chattel. Through it all, there are several people who are not directly involved in the violent seafaring action. Dressed in historical garb, there’s a white woman, then a white man, but most often a black man in a red jacket, tall black boots, and tricorn hat (is he British military?). They are watchers, witnesses to the atrocities, who look out at bodies of water on coastlines.
Randolph Rogers, Nydia, the Blind Girl of Pompeii (1856)
While Copley’s Watson (1778) and Turner’s Slave Ship (1840) have indeed proven iconic across centuries, regions, and a plethora of art historical analysis, although undeniably powerful, the status of Jackson’s and Akomfrah’s artworks in the art historical pantheon has yet to be determined. Thus, the exhibition’s pronouncement of them as masterpieces is premature. But both contemporary works are undeniably moving. Akomfrah’s video installation pounds the viewer with successive images of human greed and brutality as it has been wedded to profit from the sea. Jackson’s self-portrait is beautiful and quiet but also searing in its revelation of the economic calculus of African life during slavery.
Harriet Hosmer, Sleeping Faun (after 1865).
But of course, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston always has parts of it stunning permanent collections on display. Visit the nineteenth-century American art gallery to see their striking salon hang with paintings hung floor-to-ceiling over embroidered red wallpaper (a la days of old). The room has American treasures of neoclassical sculpture like Randolph Rogers’ Nydia, the Blind Girl of Pompeii (1856) and Harriet Hosmer’s Sleeping Faun (after 1865).
David Drake, Storage Jar (1857)
Over in the Art of the Americas installation, be sure to witness David Drake’s ceramic Storage Jar (1857). While most people associate slavery with tropical, planation agriculture, amazingly Drake who was enslaved in South Carolina, became a master potter who not only signed, but wrote poetry on his creations. On this pot, Drake announced his role as creator with the words “I made this jar for cash”. But he ended by inscribing, “Though its called lucre Trash”. (sic) Since lucre means economic gain through dishonourable means, Drake may have been recording his protest at the fact that the profit from his skill, artistic talent, and physical labour was to be stolen by his enslaver Lewis Miles, who in the end owned the pot.
William Sidney Mount, Rustic Dance after a Sleigh Ride (1830), detail
The adjacent gallery juxtaposes two of William Sidney Mount’s most famous paintings, Rustic Dance after a Sleigh Ride (1830) and The Bone Player (1856). Both works by the American artist amplify the creative genius of black musicians; in the former work as the seated black male fiddler in the left foreground of the festive (for the white guests) genre scene, and in the latter as the singular subject of the portrait-like figure study of the handsome and jovial black male musician.
William Sidney Mount, The Bone Player (1856)
Thoughtfully, the curators have installed a glass case of historical instruments in the same room, including a banjo which was derived from African instruments that survived the Middle Passage.
Installation with historical instruments with Mount’s Rustic Dance… (1830) at left and The Bone Player (1856) at right
Finally, another must-see is the temporary exhibition devoted to the artworks of the African American modernist John Wilson. Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson frames his decades long practice through the lenses of American racism, social turmoil, hatred, segregation, Jim Crow, and the patriotic service and sacrifice of African Americans. Unlike most artists, Wilson created extraordinary and powerful art across various genres and media. The exhibition includes and documents paintings, prints, children’s book illustrations, murals, and sculptures, genres studies, figure studies, and portraits. Born in 1922, Wilson came of age at a moment when segregation and domestic terrorism sought to delimit the boundaries of black American life. His poignant works like Black Soldier (1943) capture the bravery of black soldiers and the sacrifice of black families with a black soldier marching away from the picture plane towards his duty as a soldier in WWII and away from his pained black wife who comforts their small black child. In the distance, a haze engulfed Statue of Liberty stands frail and impotent.
John Wilson, Black Soldier (1943)
The exhibit also includes different works which illuminate Wilson’s preoccupation with lynching including Study for a Lynching (1946) and Study for The Incident (1952). Although Wilson’s monumental painted mural The Incident, made during his sojourn in Mexico, is now lost, the show includes a photo of the work and contextualizes the dramatic importance of its uniqueness and Wilson’s time abroad. Another exhibition highlight is a section devoted to his children’s book illustrations.
John Wilson, The Little Brown Girl
There is also a powerful display of two-dimensional (drawings and prints), and three-dimensional works representing loving and devoted black fathers with their black children.
John Wilson, Father and Child Reading
This section features the bronze maquette Father and Child Reading (1985). In this sculpture, a black father enfolds his young son who is standing between his legs as the two gaze down at a book the father holds.
John Wilson, Father and Child Reading (1985)
Both heads titled downwards, both backs curved, the son’s posture mirrors his father’s, and their bowed heads reflect their connection and the devoted care and protection the parent bestows.
John Wilson, Eternal Presence (modeled 1985, sculpted 1998)
The show also includes Wilson’s large maquette for his monumental, sculpted head for a black man, Eternal Presence (modelled 1985, sculpted 1998) and his prints and sculpture of Martin Luther King Jr.
John Wilson, Martin Luther King Jr.
Deep Waters: Four Artists and the Sea: November 9, 2024 – November 9, 2025
Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson: February 8 – June 22, 2025
Our fearless leader explores the Deep Waters exhibition