Ayana V. Jackson, Some People Have Spiritual Eyes II, 2020. Photo : Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim Gallery.
Five Black Women Artists Consider An Alternative Telling of the Atlantic Slave Trade
The origin story of Drexciya is a fictional coda to the history of the Atlantic slave trade, during which at least 1.8 million people from Africa died on slave ships and were thrown, unnamed and unrecorded, into the ocean. The Afrofuturistic narrative conceives this same ocean as a liberatory device for pregnant African women who, according to the myth, jumped or were flung alive off slave ships while being transported from Africa to the New World.
In robust interrogations of the tale, five Black women artists employ various genres and media to depict Drexciya as a sophisticated outpost of African culture: Ayana V. Jackson, Firelei Báez, Andrea Chung, Alisha Wormsley and Ellen Gallagher.
Ayana V. Jackson’s contribution to the Drexciya story is her focus on the ingenuity of the underwater civilization’s people. In her exhibition “From the Deep: In the Wake of Drexciya with Ayana V. Jackson,” on view through April 2024 at the National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., the photographer features portraits of herself, dressed in elaborate gowns that she created with the help of several Black designers.
