MYSTIC, Conn. — A momentous exhibition on the Mystic Seaport Museum honors the ancestral information and inventive innovation that circulation from Black and Indigenous communities’ sacred relationship to waterways. Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea takes guests on a journey by means of centuries of interrelated Black and Indigenous traditions of seafaring and artmaking, revealing oft-ignored histories.
Entwined is housed in Stillman, a Greek Revival-style New England constructing on the museum’s 19-acre campus. Within the foyer on the entrance, sunshine pours in from a window overlooking the Mystic River — itself a waterway stewarded by generations of Black and Indigenous peoples of the “Dawnland” (New England). There, a video and introductory texts body the exhibition as a collaborative endeavor between the museum and group members, in addition to a celebration of the still-thriving cultures of peoples indigenous to Africa and North America. Maritime narratives of ancestral and descendant voices are on the core of the curatorial staff’s interpretation of the visible and materials tradition on show.
On the middle of the primary gallery is “Mishoon/Aklo” (2023), a surprising canoe created as a collaboration between 4 artists: Sika Lobby (Togo), Alvin Ashiatey (Ghana), Hartman Deetz (Mashpee Wampanoag), and Gary Carter Jr (Mashantucket Pequot). Carved from tree trunks with fireplace and water, “dugout” canoes are a shared custom from Pequot territories to African shores, the place they’re used to navigate rivers and oceans, sustaining communities by means of fishing and sustaining connections. Close by is the oldest object on view, an Aboriginal cooking pot from 500 BCE constituted of shell-tempering expertise utilized in world Indigenous and African ceramics, one other instance of ancestral science that sustains on a regular basis life.
After strolling by means of two galleries of maritime materials tradition made by expert Black and Indigenous craftspeople, guests arrive at an unlikely house evoking historic home dwellings. The exterior construction is modeled after a standard Wampanoag wetu, a dome-shaped dwelling constituted of native supplies like cedar saplings. Although it’s introduced right here at floor degree, the inside of the wetu is designed to feel and look just like the attic of a colonial-era New England dwelling, the place enslaved Africans and Indigenous indentured staff have been usually compelled to stay. The dimly lit show evokes the captivity and loneliness of the attic, whereas the fragmented items of a sacred historic bundle on show allude to the house as a web site for privateness and non secular observe. The “Nkisi Bundle” (18th century) is a spirited assemblage of cowrie shells, beads, buttons, material scraps, and different objects utilized as a vessel to attach Africans to their ancestors. The possible proprietor, enslaved man Cardardo Wanton, would have prayed along with his nkisi bundle in non-public to guard him, hiding it beneath an attic floorboard within the meantime. Minkisi, the plural of nkisi, are vessels instilled with power and ancestral spirit in West and Central African traditions. As sacred assemblages, they promote non secular concord on the African continent and in diasporic rituals.
Leaving the intimacy of the provisional attic, the gallery opens as much as a large show of up to date artwork. The Indigenous vogue on view is resplendent: “The Rainbow Regalia” (2016) of Sherenté Mishitashin Harris (Narragansett), Two-Spirit activist and champion powwow dancer, is colourful and vibrant, with intricate beadwork, shimmering fringe, and designs that honor the Fancy Scarf custom. Close by, “Maushop’s Earrings” and “Squant’s Gorget Necklace” have been created from Quahog shells in 2023 by Elizabeth James-Perry (Aquinnah Wampanoag) as a pleasant ode to Maushop and Squant, the highly effective duo in Wampanoag folklore identified for shaping the shoreline and defending their folks. James-Perry’s “Constellation Wampum Belt” (2023) is constituted of shells woven into the form of the Bear constellation, symbolizing the connection between the earth and the sky. It sits on the modern finish of a millennia-old custom wherein coastal Indigenous communities in New England and elsewhere within the North create purple and white beaded bodily adornments from Quahog shells.
Different modern beaded and woven works have a good time the wonder and resilience of Black and Indigenous lifeways. Felandus Thames’s “Wail on Whalers, a Portrait of Amos Haskins” (2024) is a surprising beaded portrait honoring fugitive slaves who joined the whaling business. Within the Nineteenth century, Amos Haskins (Wampanoag Tribe of Homosexual Head) achieved captain standing within the whaling business, the place he labored with a various crowd of sailors, together with escaped enslaved folks and different folks of coloration. He married an African-American girl, Elizabeth P. Farmer, in 1844 and raised mixed-race youngsters together with her. Tragically, he was misplaced at sea in 1861, however his legacy lives on for example of the Nineteenth-century whaling business, the place Black and Indigenous peoples discovered kinship and monetary autonomy. Adjoining is Nafis M. White’s “TideLine” (2023–24), a wall sculpture constituted of colourful hair woven into completely different varieties, equivalent to braids, twists, and knots that cascade and coil throughout the work like tidal currents. The work’s medium line contains “hair, embodied information, ancestral recall, audacity of survival, Swarovski crystals, the artist’s sequined robes, hair baubles, gold gilded oyster shells, bobby pins” — a pleasant framing of her inventive observe that mirrors the themes of the exhibition, as hair is an ancestral, sacred, inventive course of in each Black and Indigenous communities.
Entwined takes us in numerous instructions throughout a whole lot of years of Black-Indigenous survival beneath colonialism and slavery. We witness the visible and materials tradition by means of which Africans, Natives, and their descendants adorn themselves and categorical their cultural traditions, feed their our bodies and spirits, and thrive. That this exhibition takes place in Connecticut and facilities Dawnland (New England) narratives is extremely particular. The state possible conjures photos of White, rich businessmen who work on Wall Avenue and stay in suburban Southern Connecticut mansions. Indigeneity has usually been rendered invisible in Connecticut, even because the state hosts the world’s largest museum of Native American historical past and tradition, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Analysis Heart, lower than a 30-minute drive from the Mystic Seaport Museum and from which a number of works have been loaned. Entwined is a profound assertion: Black and Indigenous histories matter right here, too. Globally and regionally, their traditions are sacred, eternal, and entwined.
Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea continues on the Mystic Seaport Museum (75 Greenmanville Avenue, Mystic, Connecticut) by means of April 19, 2026. It was curated by Akeia de Barros Gomes at the side of an exhibition advisory committee of Black and Indigenous elders, lecturers, and group members.
