A Nation Takes Place: Navigating Race and Water in Contemporary Art

Artistic perspectives on the connections between water and nation, sovereignty and ecology

Neither the metaphorical birth of a nation nor its actual violent formation is a one—time event. It is a process. A process of erasing, naming, and unnaming. Settling and unsettling. Extracting, dispossessing, and disappearing—a process of taking and placemaking. It is a tool of conquest, unthinkable without waterways, voyages, slave ships, and hemispheric maps of colonial and imperial demarcation. A ...