Audio Stop 952

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A man and a woman with black skin stand in a sage and olive-green boat that comes toward us on a wavy, dripping band of cobalt blue that spans the lower edge of this loosely hanging, square canvas. The word “WANDERER” is written in white capital letters along the bow of the boat. Closer to us, in the boat, a woman is seen from the hips up. An oval, cloud-like form covers her torso, shoulders, and the area behind her head. It is white with rose-pink swirls, and has a few black lines creating scallops around the edge. A black shape at her waist, just over a cobalt-blue skirt, could indicate that at least one arm is bent behind her back. The penis, thighs, and knees of a man are seen between the boat and the triangular, pale lilac-purple sail. The sail is painted with long, curling strokes of violet purple up its center. A long, white pennant with two gold stars flutters from the boat’s burgundy-red mast, which has a crosspiece just below the pennant. The water is painted with strokes of royal blue, which partially drip over a white skull at the lower center. The boat is set against a background layered in washes of white, shell pink, and baby blue, with swirls and thin strokes of brick red scattered across it. A yellow sun outlined in deeper gold peeks above the horizon in the lower left, and is repeated with more orbs that together make an arc that curves to the upper right corner. A few geometric line drawings hover next to the woman, on our left, such as a compass-like cross with a crosshatched oval at each end. A black number "1" floats in the lower left, above the water, and a black number "7" floats near the upper left. Two more black sevens float near the upper right, next to another heart-shaped line drawing. The background transitions from the pale washes to darker orbs of pink and blue, that overlap a band of black that nearly spans the top edge. In that upper zone, a black, gold, and red compass floats near the top of the mast, to our left. A sheet with anatomical illustrations hangs from the left arm of the mast. The drawings show cell clusters and human fetuses, some circled in red. A second drawing of a house circled in lilac purple hangs on the right arm, next to a third drawing of concentric circles. — acrylic and collage on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Gift of the Women’s Committee of the Corcoran Gallery of Art)

© Kerry James Marshall

Kerry James Marshall

Voyager, 1992

West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 60-B

Read full audio transcript

NARRATOR:
Kerry James Marshall has often contemplated the concept of the Middle Passage – the forced trans-Atlantic journey endured by African peoples taken from their homes and enslaved in the Americas and Caribbean. He has considered the difficult question of how to display the traumatic event artistically.

KERRY JAMES MARSHALL:
Well, so here is the challenge… Given that what we are trying to come to terms with is information that we’ve come to know through indirect sources, through narratives of what the event must have been like. As African Americans, we’re trying to locate our point of origin at a no place. It’s a place that’s nowhere. It’s in the middle of a vast sea.

The Voyager painting in particular, it’s about the Middle Passage but it’s also about becoming. It’s about really becoming something different.

NARRATOR:
The boat at the center of Voyager is named “Wanderer” – also the name of one of the last ships bearing enslaved Africans to land in the United States. On the sail, and surrounding the boat are a series of symbols and numbers.

KERRY JAMES MARSHALL:
If you look at the signs and emblems there, it’s like these, the Veves which are kind of Haitian voodoo emblems, all of these diagrams, they’re like cosmograms, but these are Haitian Veves.

NARRATOR:
Each form is associated with the Haitian manifestation of what were originally African – specifically Yoruba – gods and deities. For example, the cross that forms the boat’s mast represents Eshu-Elegba.

KERRY JAMES MARSHALL:
Eshu-Elegba is the god of changes in Yoruba. He’s the god of crossroads, the god of changes, the god of transitions. And Yemaya is the goddess of the ocean, the waters and things like that. I’m trying to figure out ways to construct the picture that embodies all of those concepts of transformation, of change, of birth and rebirth. I mean there is a lot of life cycle kind of imagery in a picture like this.

Afro-Atlantic Histories