Deep Waters: Four Artists and the Sea

Deep Waters: Four Artists and the Sea examines how artists across centuries and continents have portrayed the ocean’s dual nature—its beauty and its dangers—highlighting connections from John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark (1778) to J.M.W. Turner’s Slave Ship (1840), and continuing into contemporary works influenced by these historic pieces. In Some People Have Spiritual Eyes I and II (2020), photographer Ayana V. Jackson expands on these themes by exploring spirituality, femininity, and identity through self-portraits inspired by Drexciya—a mythical underwater realm inhabited by the descendants of African women who perished during the Middle Passage.

 

The exhibition encourages visitors to engage with the dialogue between these artworks and their creators, each offering a personal perspective shaped by lived experience. Together, they reveal the sea’s layered meanings—from its shimmering surface and mysterious depths to its role as a repository of memory, mourning, and loss, as well as a symbol of resilience and hope for the future.