Bahamian visual artist Anina Major’s installation, “The Landing,” is featured in the exhibition “Collective Memory,” curated by Eugenie Tsai for the Platform section of The Armory Show. The Armory Show takes place between September 6 and 8, 2024, at the Javits Center (located on 11th Avenue between 34th Street and 38th Street, Manhattan, New York).
Description: The Landing features woven ceramic sculptures and plants on a multi-level wooden dock. A rotating neon sign extends upwards from the wooden platform. This installation centers on themes of migration and a longing for home. Furthermore, Major, “mines shared histories across the African diaspora to highlight connections that manifest through the act of making.” Attached is the deck with more conceptual and material details about the overall presentation.
Anina Major is a Bahamian visual artist whose work investigates the relationships between self and place as a way of cultivating moments of reflection and a sense of belonging. Her decision to voluntarily establish a home contrary to the location in which she was born and raised motivates her to investigate the relationship between self and place as a site of negotiation.
Anina Major (she/her) is a visual artist from The Bahamas. Her decision to establish a home contrary to the location in which she was born and raised motivates her to investigate the relationship between self and place as a site of negotiation. By utilizing the vernacular of craft to reclaim experiences and relocate displaced objects, her practice exists at the intersection of nostalgia, and identity. Her practice comprises individual ceramic pieces inspired by and honouring her grandmother, Saphora Alvina Timothy Newbold (aka Mar), who was a Straw Market vendor. As a child, Major assisted her grandmother on the stall, catering to the tourists who would purchase her wares. This indigenous knowledge—of straw craft—traditionally handed down from mother to daughter, is slowly being lost to cheap imports and to the destruction the ecosystem that supports the Silver Thatch palm. Major’s decaying pots memorialise this dying art and critique the systems leading to its demise. In exhibitions, her wares are often installed in complex installations—that can also include neon, vintage advertising films, broken shells—whose set-ups are often inspired by vintage post-cards that glorify a nostalgic period in the Bahamian past or refer to our history of migration.
Major holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies, including the 2023 Joan Mitchell Fellowship, the Lighton International Artists Exchange Program (LIAEP) Award, and the EKWC, Centre-of-excellence for ceramics international artist-in-residency. [. . .]
For more information, see https://terngallery.inventory.gallery/ovr/d414c36077c478064f39b5228b82ce8a
[Shown above: Anina Major’s “The Landing,” detail; 2024. Rotating Neon, motor, metal, wood. Variable height x 62 1/2 x 37 1/2 in.]
Bahamian visual artist Anina Major’s installation, “The Landing,” is featured in the exhibition “Collective Memory,” curated by Eugenie Tsai for the Platform section of The Armory Show. The Armory Show takes place between September 6 and 8, 2024, at the Javits Center (located on 11th Avenue between 34th Street and 38th Street, Manhattan, New York). Description: The
