A Nation Takes Place

Curated by Tia Simone-Gardner and Shana M. griffin

on view August 21, 2024 - March 2, 2025

Presented by The Minnesota Marine Art Museum with support from The Mellon Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts, the National Endowment For the Arts, and Terra Foundation for American Art

The Western formation of what has become the Americas was born through water. 

The symbolic birth of a nation, nor its often violent formation, is never a one-time event. It is a process of taking, extracting, and dispossessing. Take—a verb meaning to lay hold of, to displace things or people from where they belong. 

A Nation Takes Place examines the ways seafaring imaginaries are connected to the lethal technologies of enslavement, colonialism, genocide, dispossession, and extraction. This unique perspective invites us to rethink our understanding of these historical events and their water connections. 

The exhibition draws together a collection of artwork by 38 artists and from over 20 lending partners to help us comprehend the complexity of America’s formation, a project unthinkable without waterways, conquest, and slave ships. 

While the archive, with its limitations, provides some access to the past, some histories have been erased, others remain inaccessible to language, and others are resistant to being written. In these gaps, the artists in A Nation Takes Place invite us to interpret and understand these spaces where words cannot.

• Learn More About the Exhibition

• Artists

• Lending Partners

• Exhibition Catalog

• Artworks

• Public Programs and National Convenings

• Residencies

• About the Minnesota Marine Art Museum

• Support for A Nation Takes Place

A Nation Takes Place

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. 

Artists

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

Lending Partners

Ancestors Project, Amistad Research Center, Bockley Gallery, Brooklyn Museum, Cristin Tierney Gallery, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Denver Art Museum, Galerie Myrtis, Historic, New Orleans Collection, John Campbell and Colette Hyman, Horseman Foundation, Jack Shainman Gallery, Lehmann Maupin Gallery, MAON Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Pace Gallery, Sean Kelly Gallery, Stephen Friedman Gallery, United State Naval Academy Museum, Various Small Fires, Walker Art Center. 

Exhibition Catalog

Artworks in the Exhibition

Public Programs and National Convenings

With additional support from the Terra Foundation of American Art, the Minnesota Marine Art Museum is co-hosting a series of national convenings, bringing together artists, writers, curators,  scholars, community organizers, and art professionals at critical waterways in the United States to further discussion, knowledge sharing, and cultivating networks to address new and emerging scholarship, curatorial practices and artistic expression that centers Indigenous and Black voices within the marine art and maritime genre.  

Upcoming

Past

Residencies

Select participating artists from A Nation Takes Place will participate in residencies that allow each of them to deepen their respective practice to these site-specific and time-durational opportunities, each informed uniquely to the locations in which they take place. Part of the residencies' goal is to invest in contemporary artists and challenge the confines of museum galleries as the only site by which critical conversations and art-making can take place. Existing side by side in different formats and scales, residency and exhibited artwork will draw dialogue on the wall, the page, electronically, in person, and through sound to recast the visuality of marine art and the violent formation of the nation-state.   

About the Minnesota Marine Art Museum

Founded in 2006 on the shores of the Upper Mississippi River (near the headwaters of the largest watershed on the continental United States), the Minnesota Marine Art Museum (MMAM) has been boldly pushing the boundaries of what marine art is, and can be. Operating on a seven-acre site, with a 30,000-square-foot facility, MMAM has been presenting a suite of dynamic programming and exhibitions that amplify the work contemporary American artists are doing to both challenge our assumptions about traditionally defined marine art and deepen our collective awareness about our relationship to water, over time, and across cultures.   

The mission of the Minnesota Marine Art Museum (MMAM) is to create meaningful art experiences that explore our relationship with water. With new leadership in place, MMAM is shaping an ambitious vision to be nationally recognized for leveraging the generative capacities of great art inspired by water to spark wonder and create a more compassionate and connected world for all.  

MMAM’s work is framed by these value sets: 

1. Centering work in Relationships and Collaborations that are inclusive and mutually beneficial; 

2. Steward Sustainability, Equity, and Hospitality; 

3. Operate with Honesty, Transparency, and Trust; 

4. Be Bold and Brave; and 

5. Alway Enterprising, Always Outstanding.  

A Nation Takes Place was produced as significant outcome of the organization’s 2023-2025 Strategic Plan, an opportunity for MMAM to take a fresh and expansive look at:

1. What great art inspired by water is and who the museum serves;

2. The networks and collaborators it works alongside;

3. Ways to integrate its mission across the entire visitor experience; and 

4. Its impact on the communities it operates from, both social and natural.

2024 marks a pivotal chapter in the museum’s trajectory. With support from the Mellon Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts and the National Endowment For The Arts, MMAM engaged with co-curators, Tia Simone-Gardner (Minneapolis, MN) and Shana M. griffin (New Orleans, LA) to curate a pivotal exhibition featuring more than 40 artists and 20 lending partners and a related publication featuring . 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.  Drawing from a mix of historic works from a variety of museum collections, and contemporary work commissioned for the exhibition, this project centers artists, scholars, and communities who have been systematically excluded from narratives, practices, and presentations of American marine art.

Support Comes From

The publication of A Nation Takes Place and its accompanying exhibition owe their foundation to the Indigenous Peoples of the Caribbean islands and land masses of South, North, and Central America and enslaved Africans whose lives and ways of knowing were violently disrupted and torn apart in the formation of the Americas.

We acknowledge that the Minnesota Marine Art Museum, like the City of Winona, Minnesota, exists on the unceded ancestral and contemporary homelands of the Dakota, Ho-Chunk, Ioway, Sauk, and Meskwaki people. The intertribal histories of this region, its ancestral lands, and the majestic and powerful stretches of the Hˇ ahˇáwakpa / Wakpá Tháŋka (Mississippi) River are not abstractions of a disappeared past but are a living presence of the future. 

While land acknowledgments can serve as sites of disruption, discomfit settler colonialism, and challenge erasure, we are aware that acknowledgments, on their own, are not without their challenges. They are not definitive or a one-time endeavor but an ongoing praxis for recognizing and observing

Indigenous treaty rights, learning exchanges, and alliance-building. We remain profoundly grateful and committed to learning from and supporting tribal communities, artists, activists, and scholars who make this work possible. We specifically thank Shelley Buck, Nicky Buck, Monique Verdin, Kirisitina Sailiata, Fern Renville, Brett Ramey, Cole Taylor, Jasmine Fiddler, Barry Hand, and Marlena Myles for encouraging us to think about the broader implications of this work with feedback, patience, trust, and commitment.

A Nation Takes Place is in conversation with interlocutors at institutions, initiatives, and projects, interrogating and exploring the creative possibilities of marine art beyond portraits of ships at sea. The recent groundbreaking projects Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea (2024), curated by Akeia de Barros Gomes at Mystic Seaport Museum; Dawoud Bey: Elegy (2023), curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver at the Virginia Museum of Fine Art; In American Waters: The Sea in American Painting (2021), cocurated by Dan Finnamore and Austen Barron Bailly, presented at the Peabody Essex Museum and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; as well as Finnamore’s previous project Capturing Poseidon: Photographic Encounters with the Sea (1998) are a few examples of this reimaging. Artists have dedicated monographs to such ideas—including Allan Sekula’s Fish Story (2003) and Nona Faustine’s White Shoes (2021). We are honored to be in community with these projects and artists and are sincerely inspired by their innovative approaches.

There is a monumental genealogy of writing on relationships between the Atlantic Ocean and land, without which we could not have composed this project. We are profoundly thankful to have some of these voices in this volume. Thank you to Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Jessica Marie Johnson, Tiffany Lethabo King, Katherine McKittrick, Brenda Marie Osbey, and Erin Sharkey for saying yes and lending your ideas to shape this work; and to Matthew Fluharty, Scott Pollock, and Mai’a Williams for being in conversation on the timing, location, presentation, and thematic focus of A Nation Takes Place.

We appreciate the generosity, scholarship, activism, and curatorial approaches of Jessamine Batario (Colby College Museum of Art), Dan Finnamore and George Schwartz (Peabody Essex Museum), Kyera Singleton (the Royal House & Slave Quarters), Naomi Slipp, Melanie Correia, and Amanda McMullen (New Bedford Whaling Museum), Victoria Johnson and Peter Fay (Newport Middle Passage Memorial Project), Akeia de Barros Gomes and Christina Brophy (Mystic Seaport Museum), and the docents at the Mark Twain House & Museum and the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center homes, who walked us through galleries and historical sites, fed us, and held their time open to us as this project developed.

A Nation Takes Place is deeply grateful for the collective effort and unwav- ering support of directors, gallerists, curators, and archivists of institutions, collections, galleries, and museums. Your support in filling inquiries, holding meetings, approving loan and licensing requests, and to the artists who permitted us to include their work in the exhibition and catalog has been invaluable. We would like to expressly thank the Amistad Research Center, the Ancestors Project, the Bockley Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum, the Cristin Tierney Gallery, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Denver Art Museum, the Historic New Orleans Collection, Galerie Myrtis, the Horseman Foundation, Jack Shainman Gallery, Lehmann Maupin Gallery, the Library of Congress, Pace Gallery, Sean Kelly Gallery, Stephen Friedman Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the United States Naval Academy Museum, the Walker Art Center, and the collections of John Campbell and Colette Hyman.

Collaborations significantly deepened and transformed the scope and scale of this project, moving it beyond the walls of the museum and the pages of this publication. We are immensely grateful to the University of Minnesota Press for their patience, guidance, and feedback. We want to acknowledge historian JoJo Bell, who developed an interpretive framework in the early stages of the exhibition, which continued to guide its trajectory; photographer and curator Jaysen Hohlen for their invaluable assistance in working with archival materials; designer Matthew Rezac, who worked with us in creating the visual aesthetic and design of a publication we could be proud of; and a team of copy editors—Anitra Budd and Terri Simon, working independently but with care and integrity for clarity, depth, and coherence. Thank you.

The Minnesota Marine Art Museum was pivotal in making this project a reality. We sincerely thank executive director Scott Pollock for his unwav ering commitment, curatorial assistance, support of our vision, and flexibility of engagement as the project evolved and shifted over the past two years. We also wish to thank Dave Casey, director of engagement; Heather Casper, curator of learning and community impact; and Jon Swanson, curator of collections and exhibitions. Their patience and care in communicating with artists and lending institutions, tending to the needs of the exhibition, and developing public programming helped the project materialize. Together, the team helped shape the creation of a major national exhibition and monumental publication while helping to secure critically important funding for this undertaking.

Finally, we sincerely thank the Mellon Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Union Pacific Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts for their support and investment in this project.

- Tia Simone-Garder and Shana M. griffin