Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Pauline and Nathalie Vranken with Anina Major and Her Winning Piece, The Landing, at The Armory ...
[+] Show, New York's Art Fair Photography by Kunning Huang A rotating neon sign informs us that “all us come across water” and extends upwards from a multi-level wooden dock featuring woven ceramic sculptures crafted with indigenous straw-plaiting methods and plants. Bahamas-born, U.S.
-based visual artist Anina Major learned the plaiting technique from her grandmother, Saphora Alvina Timothy Newbold (A.K.A.
Mar), who was a straw-market vendor. Living outside of, or “contrary to” her homeland, Major is compelled to explore the relationship between self and place as a site of negotiation. As a girl, Major helped Mar cater to tourists at her stall.
Using natural materials to create thatch roofs, rope and plait dates back to the arrival of free and enslaved Africans to the Bahamas. In the early 1820s, following the Adams–Onís Treaty ceding Florida from Spain to the United States, hundreds of African slaves and Black Seminoles escaped Florida and the majority settled on Andros Island in the Bahamas. Major’s installation, The Landing , was featured in the exhibition Collective Memory, curated by Eugenie Tsai, the longtime senior curator of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum, for the Platform section of the 30th anniversary edition The Armory Show in New York, which closed yesterday after welcoming more than 50,00.