The exhibition is called “Speculative Ecologies: The Intimate Bond of Freedom and Green.” Artscape producer James Baumgartner and morning host Luis Hernandez visited the Simmons Center to talk with the artist behind the exhibit, Renée Elizabeth Neely-TANNER.
The Great Dismal Swamp sits on the border of Virginia and North Carolina. It’s a place that was once home to the Maroons, a community of people who escaped slavery, but rather than flee to the north, they moved into the swamp.
“Well, there were these thousands of people who formed these communities right there in the ecosystem of the swamp, for hundreds of years before the Civil War,” Renée said. “They had familial ties that were still people enslaved in the area. And they literally hid in plain sight in this incredibly challenging ecosystem that has bears, alligators, snakes, like everything you can imagine.”
The Maroon communities formed bonds with other populations in the area, including indigenous peoples and others who were already living there.
“The slaveholders knew about this ecosystem, and they knew that people were running into it for refuge, but they were literally afraid to go into the ecosystem because it was so challenging,” she said. “I mean, this is like the Amazon, it’s like the jungle today. Literally, you can go in there and get lost.”
Renée uses bright acrylics, applied to the canvas with palette knives. Although she employs an abstract impressionist technique, you can see hints of the Great Dismal Swamp in the overlapping palette strokes of greens, browns and blues. You may even see figures hiding in the undergrowth. Renée grew up not far from the swamp but didn’t learn about the Maroon communities until she researched the area’s history.
“So as an archivist, I had a whole body of work that I had already done, but I hadn’t done any focusing on how to communicate those ideas in art,” she said. “So this residency was an opportunity. I mean, it was like a win-win – I can talk about my research, I can communicate through art. And you know, it’s funny, my other work is not abstract. And for some reason, the best way to communicate these ideas for me was through abstract work.”
We asked Renée why she found that abstraction was the best way for her to look at these ideas.
“I think it has a lot to do with freedom, because I want people to bring their own feelings and interpretation,” she said. “I’m not just giving a rigid narrative. I want anyone who engages with my work to bring their ideas to it. And I also think that it broadens the topic of what I’m projecting.”
Looking at some of the paintings, we noticed what looked like people, faces hiding in plain sight. But Renée says that wasn’t intentional.
“It’s funny – when we go in the other room, people have told me that, like ‘I see things, I see people, I see things,’ and that’s great,” she said. “I want it to be open enough and fluid enough that you bring to it whatever you see, and that makes it even better for me.”
“Speculative Ecologies” is about a particular environment and the communities who made it their home.
“But in a larger way, I want to also foreground the idea that this thread of history is not in environmental conversations today,” Renée said. “We don’t think about, oh, how did indigenous and enslaved people and their histories engage with the environment, which they have known intimately for eons, right? And I don’t want to go too deep in this, but I feel like many environmental solutions copy indigenous and traditional knowledges. Or they look to that, but then they don’t include the people. So I want people to think about that.”
Renée Elizabeth Neely-TANNER is the Heimark Artist in Residence at Brown’s Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. Her exhibit, “Speculative Ecologies,” is on display there now through Dec. 8.
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