A Nation Takes Place Convenings

Over lunch, we’ll meet the organizers behind the exhibition, A Nation Takes Place project, co-curators Tia-Simone Gardiner (St. Paul, MN) Shana M. griffin (New Orleans, LA) and MMAM executive director, Scott Pollock (Winona, MN).  Guest panelists will also include catalog contributors, Mai’a Williams (Winona, MN), Elana Mann (Los Angeles, CA),  and Dameun Strange (Minneapolis, MN). 

Together, we’ll hear about the origins of the exhibition, how the themes of the exhibition came together, and why select artists, writers, and project partners were selected for this exhibition, and related 152 page publication, that asks us where does the historical representation of the sea intersect with the canon of “American Art”? Why does neither maritime art or American Art, viz-viz modernism, have strong references to the trade of goods, of unheroic men, to the blood and unfreedoms that were accumulated and carried over oceans to make “a new world”? How does water, and the artists who are engaging with it in this exhibition, become the material and the place of resistance, to hear, feel, and sing new narratives. And given the symbolic power of the ocean, a place of many endings but also infinite beginnings, how are artists, historians, cultural bearers, ecologists and writers activating the past into new forms of cultural power. 

Our convening will also take us through the exhibition, stopping to reflect on the large scale installations by Renee Royale (New York, NY) and kai lumumba barrow (Chicago, IL) before moving out to the Upper Mississippi River shoreline, where we’ll meet Seitu Jones and encounter Art Ark, his latest fully functioning floating art project that channels the spirit of radical social movements, born on the water, into experiences that foster critical conversations and nurture more just and vibrant communities.

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