Join us on for a gallery talk within Spirit in the Land by Jessica Womack, Nasher graduate student intern and PhD Candidate in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. European colonialism in the Americas brought forth massive ecological disruption as natural landscapes were turned into plantations for the monocropping of cash crops like cotton, sugarcane and tobacco. As local environments were transformed, the knowledge and practices of Indigenous people and enslaved Africans—including ways of engaging with the natural world—were denigrated, criminalized and erased. Works by contemporary artists included in Spirit in the Land, such as those by Annalee Davis, Tamika Galanis, Meryl McMaster and Charmaine Watkiss, force us to confront the breaks created by the colonial project and show us how memory and ritual help us to imagine and make real different ways of being and relating to the earth.
