Events
Minnesota Marine Art Museum presents exhibition titled "A Nation Takes Palace".
sokari ekine
Aug 22, 2024
Groundbreaking Exhibition Fills In Gaps on Race, Slavery and Water Where Conventional Marine Art Cannot A Nation Takes Place features a transnational collection of artwork by 38 artists from 21 lending partners to interrogate the complexity of the Americas formation, a project unthinkable without waterways, conquest, and slave ships.
WINONA, MN (August 8, 2024). The Minnesota Marine Art Museum (MMAM) is excited to announce its curatorial collaboration with artists and scholars Tia-Simone Gardner and Shana M. griffin to present the groundbreaking exhibition A Nation Takes Place, set to open on August 21, 2024.
Drawing critical attention to the “liquid fantasies” of the sea, A Nation Take Place navigates race and the violent silences, voids, ruptures, breaks, and counterworld formations often overlooked by traditional maritime art. The exhibition features 38 artists and partnerships with 21 lending institutions, pairing contemporary artworks alongside their historical counterparts to examine how the imaginaries of seafaring are connected to the destructive forces of enslavement, colonialism, genocide, dispossession, and extraction.
Featuring over 100 works encompassing paintings, sculpture, film, photography, installations, and ephemera, A Nation Takes Place challenges the romanticized portrayal of the maritime world and instead presents it as a space of haunting, a capitalist playground, a violent terrain, a site of resistance, and a place to rethink the ecological imaginary. As a radical survey of such themes, the artists engage sea stories—the violent, disorienting, unpredictable, yet also romantic, sublime, and powerful—that situate Black and Indigenous peoples as unapologetic narrators of marine worlds.
The exhibition is accompanied by a 152-page illustrated catalog, A Nation Takes Place: Navigating Race and Water in Contemporary Art, distributed by the University of Minnesota Press, featuring seven newly published essays by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Jessica Marie Johnson, Tiffany Lethabo King, Katherine McKittrick, Brenda Marie Osbey, Erin Sharkey, and exhibition co-curators, Tia-Simone Gardner and Shana M. griffin. “The more we delved into the art genre steeped in the visuality of ships, vessels, overseas trading, voyages of exploration, and colonial expansion, the more we encountered the recurring neglect and disregard for the histories of slavery, conquest, and colonialism,” notes co-curator Shana M. griffin. “The exhibition is an incubator, an assembly,” recalls co-curator Tia-Simone Gardner. “It asks us to witness again, how have we encountered the wet world around us, the rivers, the oceans, the seas, gulfs, and marshes. How did we get close to them, or how were they eradicated from our consciousness? In this way, the exhibition is more choreographed than curated.”
A Nation Takes Place opens at MMAM on August 21, 2024 to mark the anniversary of the start of Haitian Revolution in 1791, the largest and most successful insurrection by self-emancipated Black people in the Western Hemisphere. A reception and catalog launch is planned for August 22, 2024 (5:30 p.m. - 8 p.m.) at MMAM, followed by the first of four national convenings on August 23, 2024 (12 p.m. - 2 p.m.) at MMAM that explores the content of the exhibition. The exhibition runs through March 2, 2025.
Major support for the project comes from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment For the Arts, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the Terra Foundation for American Art. Their generosity allowed for co-curators, Tia-Simone Gardner and Shana M. griffin to consult with and build on the ongoing scholarship, activism, and curatorial approaches at a cross section of institutions, initiatives, and projects across the United States who are interrogating and exploring the creative possibilities of marine art beyond portraits of ships at sea. Based on their research, conversations, and site visits, the curatorial team and MMAM staff developed the checklist and thematic organization for the show.
“The number of lending partners and collaborators is monumental for an organization like MMAM,” notes Scott Pollock, Executive Director. “Nothing to this scale would be possible without the support we received from our major funding partners.” The 4,568 square foot exhibition in MMAM’s Manoogian Gallery is organized around three main themes. Section 1: The Ledger, draws our attention to the political economy of seafaring and its relationship to the international and domestic slave trade and colonization. Artists like Claire Foster-Burnett, Gordon Coons, Wendy W. Walters, and Dyani White Hawk remind us to examine historic and contemporary connections across the production of art, the production of settler nations, and the production of wealth.
Artworks created by Radcliffe Bailey and kai lumumba barrow encourage us to re-examine our own attachments to the ocean’s representations, particularly of the coast, ship, and seascape. Section 2: The Wake/The Break, peers into the absences of inherited marine narratives and emphasizes the transformative potential of art to resist, reimagine, and intervene. Artists like Torkwase Dyson explore the relationships among the built environment and Black ecologies.
Artworks by Jacob Lawrence, Dred Scott, Fred Wilson, and Imani Jacqueline Brown examine historical and contemporary injustices. Section 3: The Deep, introduces us to artists that press against unjust national myths born from colonial Atlantic contact. Work from artist like Dawoud Bey, Renee Royale, Willie Birch, Deborah Jack, and Wesley Clark remember and invent counterworld formations, where we can breathe underwater, where we can be insulated from the terror of the ocean, of bodies of water, by beauty. In this same section, artworks by Pamela Longoardi and Peter Happel Christian remind us of the connections between oceans, lakes, and human-environmental impact. They 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.
ABOUT CO-CURATORS
Tia-Simone Gardner is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and undisciplined Black feminist geographer, committed to understanding relationships between Blackness and landscape. She is a 2023–24 McKnight Visual Artist Fellow. Her work has shown both nationally and internationally, and her writing has appeared in Georgia, an independently published arts writing journal, and New Suns, a journal published by USA Artists. Gardner is an assistant professor of media and cultural studies at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN.
Shana M. griffin is a Black feminist activist, researcher, geographer, sociologist, abolitionist, and artist. Her practice is interdisciplinary, research-based, and decolonial, existing across the fields of sociology, geography, Black feminist thought, and land-use planning and within movements challenging displacement, carcerality, reproductive control, climate impacts, and gender-based violence. She is the recipient of several awards, including a 2025 Loeb/ArtLab Fellow at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2022 Andy Warhol Curatorial Research Fellow, and 2021 Creative Capital Awardee.
ABOUT MMAM 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 what it 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 amplifies the work contemporary 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 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.
A Nation Takes Place was produced to align and support 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.
PRESS CONTACT Caitlin Crouchet, Director of Communications ccrouchet@mmam.org 507-474-1810 Dave Casey, Director of Engagement dcasey@mmam.org 507-474-1916 Minnesota Marine Art Museum 800 Riverview Drive, Winona, MN 55987 MMAM.org | 507.474.6626
Minnesota Marine Art MuseumThe Minnesota Marine Art Museum is a nonprofit visual art museum that creates meaningful experiences that explore our relations with water. Located in Winona, Minnesota, the purpose-built museum is located on the banks of the Mississippi River. It...
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