Curator

  • Art Institute Chicago
  • Harvard art museum
  • My Exhibition
A work made of toned gelatin silver print with mixed media.

Mama Wata

1995

Radcliffe Bailey American, born 1968

United States

Radcliffe Bailey took up the figure of Mami Wata—a general name for numerous mermaid goddesses popu-larized in the 19th century by Black peoples around the Atlantic Ocean—as part of a long-lived fascination with water and its powers of transformation. Bailey’s technique of collaging old photographs, cryptic letters, and allusive decorations, often with backgrounds of indigo or green, here suggests shape-shifting as a human and aesthetic ideal. In Sabine Jell-Bahlsen’s 1991 video Mammy Water, which Bailey admired, a narrator explains: “Many Mammy Water followers are prophets or mediums of the water spirits. As performing artists, they express new ideas and forms.”

Toned gelatin silver print with mixed media

Photography and Media

African Diaspora

African American artists