Land Ho!

Label

This triptych focuses on the ships of the middle passage. Brightly clothed figureheads adorn each of these brown vessels. In the print to the left, people whose bodies are made of bright colors tumble and fly over the ship’s sails. In the center image, the billowing sails of the ships are covered in West African symbols, or adinkra, and the fabric bears the patterns and colors of textiles commonly used in West Africa. In the print to the right, the ships are devoid of color and the colorful people from the first panel fill rowboats that are heading away from the massive vessels. In works like this, Julien Sinzogan creates images that imagine the removal of Africans from their shores to be enslaved in the Americas and the possibility of their spirits returning to their native lands in the afterlife.

From the 2026 exhibition Inhabiting Historical Time: Slavery and Its Afterlives, curated by Amelia Kahl (Barbara C. & Harvey P. Hood 1918 Senior Curator of Academic Programming) and Alisa Swindell (Associate Curator of Photography)

Exhibition History

Inventory: New Works and Conversations around African Art, Friends Gallery/Owen Robertson Cheatham Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, January 16-March 13, 2016.

Provenance

October Gallery Trust, London; sold to present collection, 2015.

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