Bechuana Belle

Transcript:

Shawnta Smith-Cruz: I think, in this image in particular, I found that there was a great deal of movement between the images and how the composition really shows how they're either looking toward each other or looking away. Could you say a bit more about how you compose the pieces and the story that it tells in relationship for these groups to each other?

Jacqueline Bishop: So one of the things that I was trying to counter is, especially when it came to Indigenous images or early African American images, a sense of things being static. History is not static. Right? What happened during that time sticks to the very moments that we live in, even though it was hundreds of years ago. I wanted to get a sense of that fluidity, and that ongoingness, between that period of time and how it lingers into our time; if we have the eyes with which to see this. I also think of the images in relation to each other. So when I'm working on the images, they have to have some way of having a kind of communication towards each other.

And so we see this person here with a child, right? And it's almost as though the figure at the bottom is guiding and protecting that child. And overlooking it all, is the European immigrant to America, and you know they have to find a way to all live together now in this new space that we call America, particularly in New York; and I'm very, very keen to try to understand how changes in maritime trade brought all of this into focus.