By Kathleen Stone

By juxtaposing different artistic approaches, the past with the present, Deep Waters offers a fresh way to consider what we humans have done to the ocean, to the creatures that depend on it, and to each other.

Deep Waters: Four Artists and the Sea at the Museum of Fine Arts, through November 9, 2025

Joseph Mallord William Turner, Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On), 1840. Photo: MFA

Slave Ship, J.M.W. Turner’s painting, stops me in my tracks every time I see it at the Museum of Fine Arts. At first glance, it seems a phantasmagoria of colorful clouds above the ocean, but underneath the clouds is a real and troubling truth. The red and orange sky signals an approaching typhoon, but far more ominous are the human limbs and chains poking out of the water, those of Africans forcibly transported across the ocean until the captain, having piloted the ship into the windless Doldrums, ordered more than a hundred souls cast overboard. The event is not a figment of artistic imagination — it actually occurred in 1781, followed by a notorious legal case in which the ship’s owner pressed an insurance claim for the value of persons “lost at sea.” Turner, using swirls of paint and horrifying details, reminded viewers of the moral abyss that was slavery as well as the commercial interests and legal rationales that enabled it. The painting was created and exhibited in London in 1840, the year that city hosted an international antislavery conference. The painting is a key ingredient in the MFA’s multifaceted and thought-provoking exhibit Deep Waters: Four Artists and the Sea.

John Akomfrah, Vertigo Sea, 2015. Photo: MFA

In addition to Slave Ship’s considerable historic interest, it also has contemporary resonance. John Akomfrah, a Ghanaian-born British artist, credits Turner’s painting as an inspiration for Vertigo Sea (2015), his three-channel video installation.

Photographer Ayana V. Jackson, in two self-portraits titled Some people have spiritual eyes I and II (2020), also alludes to the ocean’s role in facilitating slavery.

The oldest work in the show is John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark, painted in 1778, about a shark attack that occurred decades earlier. The subject matter is unusual, as is the fact that Copley highlights a Black man in the rescue effort, which leads one to wonder how the man came to join the crew of a British ship that anchored in Havana, Cuba, in 1749, where the slave trade was booming. These artists dramatize the ocean as both beautiful and terrifying: it is at the center of the ways in which colonial conquest, slavery, migration, and the slaughter of whales and polar bears led to the despoliation of nature and an exposition of the human character.

John Singleton Copley, Watson and the Shark, 1778. Photo: MFA

The ocean’s terror is plain in Copley’s painting. At the bottom of the canvas is the starkly white body of Brook Watson, then a 14-year-old cabin boy who was bathing near his ship when a large shark appeared, poised to attack. The boy and the shark seem slightly oversized, holding the viewer’s attention at the bottom of the image. Above these two figures is a boat with eight men, each trying, frantically, to rescue Watson. At the apex of the pyramidal composition is the sole Black man who holds one end of the line that Watson, in the water, is desperately trying to grasp. The Black sailor and Watson reach out to each other, gestures of panicked yet sympathetic understanding that also animate the canvas. We have no biographical information about the Black man pictured, but we do know that Watson, who lost his right leg below the knee, had a successful career in mercantile affairs and politics — successful enough for him to commission Copley to memorialize his ordeal.

Ayana V. Jackson, Some people have spiritual eyes II, 2020. Photo: MFA

Ayana V. Jackson also deals with Black representation and the ocean’s treachery in her work. Jackson, a Black woman, is the sole figure in her photographs, standing on the sand before a background of gently breaking waves. The waves seem benign but her gown, made of Ghanaian currency, is a reminder that the ocean was the slave trader’s highway, and Ghana one of the trade’s business centers. In one photo, Jackson looks at the viewer with an expression that defies anyone to sweep the history of slavery under the rug, or to mess with her at all. In the second, her back to the viewer, she raises her hands, maybe to stop, at least metaphorically, slavers from coming ashore. But having just studied Turner’s depiction of the hands of dying Africans, I could not help but see her gesture as a parallel to their grasping into the air.

Life underwater is a subject that deeply interests Jackson. According to her website, her art is influenced by Drexciya, a Detroit-based techno duo who imagined the existence of an underwater kingdom populated by children of pregnant African women who were thrown overboard or jumped into the ocean during the Middle Passage. Jackson herself splits time between Brooklyn and Johannesburg, each a location within vertices of the slave trade’s triangular route.

John Akomfrah’s video installation is the most expansive work in the show. It deals with slavery and other dangers of the ocean, including colonization, migration, whaling, polar bear hunting, political conflict, and environmental degradation. Over the course of 48 minutes, suggestive, evocative images play across three screens, looping from one theme to the next. It’s a digressive approach whose fascination stems from its evocation of the ocean’s power — its beauty and its destructive potential. Schools of fish, flocks of birds, forests of plankton, and pods of whales fill the screens. Sounds animate the background — music, the crash of waves, narration of tragic and cruel events, as well as fragments of writing by Herman Melville, Virginia Woolf, Heathcote Williams, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Some of the footage reflects the present — migrants dying at the hands of traffickers, for instance — while actors dressed in colonial garb are reminders of who plundered the ocean in the past. Archival stills of enslaved Africans are even starker reminders of that history.

Deep Waters has a long run, until November of next year, which is a good thing because you probably will want to visit the show more than once, to let it all sink in. I certainly did. The ideas explored here are not new, but by juxtaposing different artistic approaches, the past with the present, the result is a fresh way to consider what we humans have done to the ocean, to the creatures that depend on it, and to each other.

Kathleen Stone is the author of They Called Us Girls: Stories of Female Ambition from Suffrage to Mad Men, an exploration of the lives and careers of women who defied narrow, gender-based expectations in the mid-20th century. Her website is kathleencstone.com.