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.
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 by 38 different artists from more 19 different lending partners, in an effort to help us comprehend the complexity of the United States’ formation, a project unthinkable without waterways, conquest, and slave ships.
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.