Harriet Tubman

Transcript:

Shawnta Smith-Cruz: Can you say a bit about gender? In the last image we have male bodies, and in this next image we have the bodies of women and a child. So could you say a bit about how the demographics of the different images play out, and how you're constructing these variations?

Jacqueline Bishop: So one of the things that was very surprising to me was, in fact, the lack of images of women. They're very scarce in early New York. They're particularly scarce, strange enough, for Indigenous women. And so I wanted to bring their story forward: The Indigenous women, the African American women, the early European women, and it was just very hard to do.

In this image, what you're looking at is a New York that is rapidly changing by the boats. We see the maritime trade that's going on at the bottom of the image. But I was really, really pleased to have within this image three sets of groups. Three groups: an African American woman who played a key role in movements of underground slavery, and all of that, a European woman, and an Indigenous person. They're all coming together in this rapidly expanding New York.

Key to all of this is the river that moves people back and forth. So I was very keen, and of course, the plants that are part of the image are also part of the story of New York. And part of the reason actually in large part why events were set in place. People were voyaging out to find new plants, to find new flowers, to find new ways of being. And so the plants themselves tell a story that brought these three groups together.