Landscape

What does the landscape hide? The exuberant, colorful, and lush beauty of the tropical landscape often conceals painful and violent histories. Rather than represent these histories in narrative ways, the artists on view in this section employ diverse techniques—often depicting the flora of a place, including trees and plants, as well as gardens— to reference histories of colonialism, migration, and resource extraction.

An Ocean Cradle

Suchitra Mattai (b. 1973, Georgetown, Guyana; lives in Los Angeles, CA) Vintage saris, fabric, and ghungroo bells An oceanic landscape woven together from vintage handmade saris, Suchitra Mattai’s An Ocean Cradle alludes to movement in many ways. Collected from family and friends living throughout the South Asian diaspora, the saris not only represent travel and migration, but they also gesture toward movement across lineage. Customarily passed down from generation to generation, saris carry the memories and scents from those who wore them before. From the 1830s to the early 1900s, waves of Indian migrants—Mattai’s ancestors included— migrated across the ocean from India to British Guiana (now Guyana) to work as indentured servants on sugar cane plantations. A significant Indo-Guyanese community remains in Guyana today.

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. . . the wailing . . . guides us home . . . and there is a bellying on the land . . .

Ebony G. Patterson (b. 1981, Kingston, Jamaica; lives in Chicago, IL, and Kingston) Mixed media on Jacquard woven photo tapestry and custom vinyl wallpaper

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Cursed Grounds: Cursed Borders

Didier William (b. 1983, Port-au-Prince, Haiti; lives in Philadelphia, PA) Acrylic, oil, ink, and wood carving on panel

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