{"id":12311,"date":"2025-10-28T15:26:39","date_gmt":"2025-10-28T15:26:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/?p=12311"},"modified":"2025-10-28T15:27:16","modified_gmt":"2025-10-28T15:27:16","slug":"painting-the-pelagic-the-mfa-boston-takes-us-to-sea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/2025\/10\/painting-the-pelagic-the-mfa-boston-takes-us-to-sea\/","title":{"rendered":"Painting the Pelagic: The MFA Boston Takes Us To Sea"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Humanity has wrestled with the sea for millennia. Caligula declared war on Neptune. Magellan sought to subdue the oceans by circumnavigating the globe, only to meet death in a distant archipelago. Tempests wrecked the seemingly invincible Spanish Armada. Millions were forced across Atlantic waters in bondage. Mesopotamian reed boats evolved into modern steel leviathans. The sea has been both a great road and barrier in the course of empire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the ocean\u2019s role in migration, colonization and industrialization takes center stage in \u201cDeep Waters: Four Artists and the Sea,\u201d on view through November 9, 2025. Curated by Theo Tyson, the show features just two rooms and four works,  made centuries apart, following what the museum describes<\/a> as \u201ca genealogical thread united by the sea.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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John Singleton Copley, Watson and the Shark, 1778\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

How might a man of African descent come to serve aboard a British ship in a Spanish colony where the slave trade flourished? This question reverberates through John Singleton Copley\u2019s \u201cWatson and the Shark.\u201d The oil painting portrays the true 1749 incident in which a shark attacked a fourteen-year-old cabin boy named Brook Watson in Havana Harbor. Watson\u2014who survived but lost a leg\u2014went on to become a prominent statesman and commissioned Copley to depict the ordeal decades later. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Copley modeled Watson\u2019s figure on the statue of the Borghese Gladiator, aligning with neoclassical aesthetics commonly found in 18th-century art. Curiously, the painter had never seen a shark. His anatomically incorrect rendering\u2014with forward-facing eyes, nostrils emitting air and oddly anthropoid lips\u2014was likely based on second-hand descriptions. The harpoon, pointed at the beast\u2019s maw, could function as an instrument of rescue or an assertion of mastery over nature and the alleged primitive. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Black sailor reaching towards the imperiled boy is conspicuously absent from preliminary sketches of the work, leading to speculation around his later inclusion. Did Copley intend to gesture towards racial solidarity? Convey concord and kinship in a moment of mortal peril? Delineate the beastly and the humane? The cruel and the compassionate? The painting leaves its viewer in wonder. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On, 1840
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

At first glance, J. M. W. Turner\u2019s \u201cThe Slave Ship\u201d appears to be a radiant seascape, reminiscent of various works by Poussin, Monet or even Turner himself. Yet, upon closer inspection, the painting reveals another scene of maritime catastrophe. Beneath a fiery sun, limbs and chains thrash amid churning waves. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Painted as an indictment of the slave trade, Turner recalls the 1781 Zong Massacre, when the captain of the British slave ship Zong ordered more than 130 sick enslaved Africans to be thrown overboard so their deaths could be claimed as insurance losses. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Turner evokes the Burkean concept of the \u201csublime,\u201d or the simultaneous awe and terror that arises when considering man\u2019s helplessness before the vast, indifferent and uncontrollable power of the natural world. By dramatizing the sea and sky, Turner casts nature as both executioner and avenger. Some interpret the incoming typhoon as impending divine justice upon the moral depravity of slavery. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Slave Ship\u201d also addresses the ocean\u2019s role as a medium of commerce and exploitation. The primary highway of the transatlantic slave trade continues to facilitate a great majority of global trade today, perpetuating exploitative hierarchies and environmental degradation.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ayana V. Jackson, Some People Have Spiritual Eyes I & II, 2020\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Adjacent hangs \u201cSome People Have Spiritual Eyes,\u201d a two-part self-portrait by Ayana V. Jackson. The artist\u2019s dress, structurally reminiscent of the Victorian era and composed of Ghanaian cedi<\/em> notes stitched together, represents how imperialist greed commodified human beings. She presents herself as a citizen of Drexciya, an imaginary Afrofuturist underwater kingdom populated by the children of pregnant women who passed away during the Middle Passage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jackson stares directly at the viewer in the first panel, her expression solemn. She states, \u201cMany people have suffered from having their identities displaced through a racist colonial gaze.\u201d Her response? A distinctive gaze of her own, meant to challenge conventional ideas of \u201cbeauty and civilization and the narratives of slavery and the ocean seen elsewhere in this gallery.\u201d In the second panel, she faces the sea, possibly paying her respects to what she regards as a colossal grave. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The second room immerses viewers in the stunning footage of John Akomfrah\u2019s Vertigo Sea, a forty-minute, three-channel video installation presented for the first time in New England. Through a montage spanning from the age of Ahab to the present, Akomfrah explores our simultaneous fascination, exploitation and dependence on the sea. \u201cIt’s a very impactful viewing experience, especially with the surround sound\u2014it’s old movie theater style,\u201d said one visitor. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One moment, we witness miracles of nature\u2014whales breaching, jellyfish drifting in bioluminescent light, panoramic shots of the shore\u2014and the next, we are plunged into horror\u2014industrial fishing, marine life flayed by harpoons, reenactments of the Middle Passage, refugees adrift on rafts, polar bears dying on melting ice. As the Boston Globe<\/a> notes, the ocean\u2019s \u201cdizzying crosscurrents of colonialism, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, contemporary capitalism and ongoing migrant strife\u201d course through this film. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis exhibit encompasses two of our greatest masterpieces, \u2018The Slave Ship\u2019 by Turner and \u2018Watson and the Shark\u2019 by Copley, in conversation with contemporary photography and video art,\u201d said Laura Gomez Ickes, a Visitor Information Specialist at the MFA Boston and K-5 art educator. \u201cIt brings everything together and makes the art even more impactful. Despite the gory or sensitive subject matter, it\u2019s very important that it\u2019s being shown. It’s one of my favorite exhibits here, and I am very glad that it’s staying for as long as it is.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDeep Waters: Four Artists and the Sea\u201d asks us to face what we have done to one another and to the natural world. It is an elegy and an indictment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ocean may be the site of evil, but this exhibition reminds us that perhaps the greater evil lies not in the sea, but in ourselves.  <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Humanity has wrestled with the sea for millennia. Caligula declared war on Neptune. Magellan sought to subdue the oceans by circumnavigating the globe, only to meet death in a distant archipelago. Tempests wrecked the seemingly invincible Spanish Armada. Millions were forced across Atlantic waters in bondage. Mesopotamian reed boats evolved into modern steel leviathans. The sea has been both a great road and barrier in the course of empire. At the Museum of Fine Arts<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":375,"featured_media":12312,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[319,435,644,318,320],"tags":[],"coauthors":[630],"class_list":["post-12311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts","category-culture","category-features","category-news","category-politics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Screenshot-2025-10-28-at-11.18.14-AM-e1761664798735.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/375"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12311"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12311\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12319,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12311\/revisions\/12319"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12311"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=12311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}