The River That Flows Both Ways (2025)
Images and descriptions of six ceramic plates featuring collages created by Jacqueline Bishop.
Ann Zingha, Queen of Matamba
Medium: Digital collage printed on commercial porcelain ceramic plate with gold rims
Dimensions: 12 × 12 × 0.5 in
Date: 2025
Description:
This collage honors the legacy of Queen Nzinga Mbande, known here as Ann Zingha, a 17th-century ruler of the Ndongo and Matamba Kingdoms in present-day Angola. Renowned for her diplomatic brilliance and military strategy, Nzinga resisted Portuguese colonization and fought for the sovereignty of her people. Her image, sourced from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, is paired with a portrait of an African woman from the same archive, creating a dialogue between historical representation and cultural resilience.
The collage also incorporates an “1812 New York Letter,” referencing the city’s complex entanglement with slavery and commerce during the early 19th century. Botanical motifs of Datura Stramonium (Thorn Apple) weave through the composition, an intoxicating plant historically used in medicine and ritual, symbolizing transformation, danger, and visionary states. Rendered on a porcelain plate with gold rims, the work juxtaposes opulence with resistance, inviting reflection on power, memory, and the enduring struggle for liberation.
Jennie Bobb and Her Daughter
Medium: Digital print collage on commercial porcelain ceramic plate with gold rims
Dimensions: 12 × 12 × 0.5 in
Date: 2025
Description:
This collage centers on a 1915 photograph of Jennie Bobb and her daughter, Nellie Longhat, Delaware Native Americans of the Lenape tribe who lived in Oklahoma, where many Lenape people relocated from Staten Island. Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society, their image embodies continuity and adaptation amid displacement.
The composition juxtaposes this intimate portrait with Benjamin West’s Penn’s Treaty with the Indians, an allegorical painting that mythologizes William Penn’s meeting with Lenape leaders along the Delaware River. While idealized, the image has become an enduring icon of American history, raising questions about representation and erasure. A historical view of Washington Square Arch in winter, sourced from the New-York Historical Society, anchors the work in the urban landscape, connecting Lenape heritage to the city’s layered past.
Peter Stuyvesant
Medium: Digital print collage on commercial porcelain ceramic plate with gold rims
Dimensions: 12 × 12 × 0.5 in
Date: 2025
Description:
This collage examines the layered histories of power, ritual, and survival through the figure of Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch director-general of New Netherland and a pivotal architect of early New York City. His image, attributed to Hendrick Couturier and historically misattributed to Rembrandt, evokes the colonial ambitions that shaped Manhattan’s expansion and left enduring marks on the city’s geography and identity.
Juxtaposed with Stuyvesant is a painting of a Thunder Pipe Ceremony, a Blackfoot celebration of spring renewal and healing, where a medicine man applies sacred vermilion streaks to an adherent’s face. This ceremonial image counters the narrative of conquest with one of spiritual continuity and cultural resilience. Botanical elements, Laurus Sassafras, Arum triphyllum (Dragon Root), and Triosteum perfoliatum (Fever Root), thread through the composition, referencing Indigenous medicinal knowledge and its role in sustaining life amid upheaval.
Mrs. White Wings
Medium: Digital print collage on commercial porcelain ceramic plate with gold rims
Dimensions: 12 × 12 × 0.5 in
Date: 2025
Description:
Mrs. White Wings is a layered digital collage that bridges histories of resilience and exploitation. At its center is a 1915 photograph of Mrs. White Wings from the Blackfoot Tribe, juxtaposed with imagery of a Market Woman drawn from the exhibition New York at Its Core: 400 Years of NYC History at the Museum of the City of New York. The composition incorporates a historical image of the New York Life Insurance Building, a stark reminder of the city’s entanglement with slavery, abolished in New York State in 1827, yet perpetuated through financial institutions, shipping, and insurance companies that profited from insuring enslavers against the death of enslaved people.
Botanical elements, including the Jerusalem artichoke, a North American species of sunflower known as sunroot or sunchoke, thread through the work, symbolizing endurance and regeneration. Rendered on a porcelain plate with gold rims, the piece evokes domesticity and ornamentation while interrogating the intersections of commerce, colonization, and cultural survival.
Bechuana Belle
Medium: Digital print collage on commercial porcelain ceramic plate with gold rims
Dimensions: 12 × 12 × 0.5 in
Date: 2025
Description:
Bechuana Belle reimagines a 19th-century illustration by William Cornwallis Harris, depicting a Tswana (Bechuana) woman and her child, as a lens through which to examine colonial narratives and Indigenous resilience. The composition juxtaposes this iconic image with Willem Kieft, Director of New Netherland (1638–1646), whose imposition of a tax on Indigenous tribes along the Hudson River precipitated violent massacres.
Also featured is an engraving from the Allegory of New Amsterdam/New York, a 17th-century European visual trope that personified the Americas as a native woman surrounded by exotic flora and fauna, an image that framed the “New World” as primitive, exploitable, and in need of Christianization.
Botanical elements such as Phytolacca decandra (Poke), historically used for medicinal purposes, and Cattails, valued for food, craft, and healing, weave through the collage, symbolizing survival and knowledge systems that endured despite colonial violence.
Harriet Tubman
Medium: Digital print collage on commercial porcelain ceramic plate with gold rims
Dimensions: 12 × 12 × 0.5 in
Date: 2025
Description:
This collage features Harriet Tubman, abolitionist, freedom fighter, and conductor of the Underground Railroad, who escaped slavery in Maryland and guided more than seventy families to liberation. Tubman eventually settled in Auburn, New York, where she built a life for her family and community. Her image anchors a composition that interlaces narratives of resistance and power across centuries.
Beside Tubman appears a Lenape man, referencing the Indigenous presence in New York’s history, and Johannes Vermeer’s Young Woman with a Water Pitcher (ca. 1662), a symbol of Dutch mercantile wealth and domestic authority during the colonial era. These juxtapositions evoke tensions between empire and emancipation, commerce and care.
Botanical elements, Geranium maculatum (Common Cranesbill), Eupatorium perfoliatum (Thoroughwort), and Podophyllum peltatum (Mayapple), thread through the work, recalling Indigenous and settler medicinal practices that sustained life amid hardship.
Rendered on a porcelain plate with gold rims, the piece contrasts ornamental beauty with histories of struggle, inviting reflection on liberation, survival, and the intertwined roots of diasporic identity.