Los Angeles-based artist Todd Gray (b. 1954) explores the Diasporic dislocations and cultural connections between the West and West Africa. The National Gallery of Art has acquired its first work by the artist, Atlantic (Double Dutch) (2022), an example of Gray’s “photo-sculptures,” in which two or more framed photographs are arranged to create large-scale, three-dimensional tableaus. Combining images of grand, baroque architecture in Europe and the United States with those of historical sites and landmarks in West Africa, Gray’s Atlantic series alludes to the slave trade and colonialism as the historical source of European and American wealth and power. 

The layered images in Atlantic (Double Dutch) come from Gray’s recent travels through Europe, the US, and Ghana, his second home. From bottom to top, the photographs depict the Grand Waterfall in the gardens of the National Palace of Queluz in Lisbon, Portugal; a view from inside the Grand Rotunda of the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco; and two oval-shaped, framed images of the Atlantic Ocean. The uppermost image shows three Black Ghanaians observing a bird from Fort Saint Anthony, which was constructed by the Portuguese in 1515 and used to support the enslavement of African people. Built two centuries later by King Pedro III, the National Palace of Queluz is often called the Portuguese Versailles. Gray’s work connects the palace’s opulence with Portugal’s history of enslavement and trafficking of African people, bringing attention to the relationship between Blackness and colonial Europe and its difficult implications. 

The phrase “Double Dutch” in the title recalls the eventual capture of Fort Saint Anthony by the Dutch in 1642, as well as the jump-roping style popularized by African American youth. Doubling is also a formal device in Atlantic (Double Dutch). Two rectangular photographs featuring baroque styles of architecture (at the Palace of Fine Arts and the National Palace of Queluz) lie beneath two oval-shaped images of the Atlantic Ocean. The repetition and overlapping composition effectively collapse time, centering and grounding Black histories that live on in the present day.