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Artworks
Knowledge of the Elements, Revolution of the Planets, 2022
Appliqué textile106 1/2 x 80 3/4 in.
270.5 x 205.1 cmSoldFurther images
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In 'Knowledge of the Elements, Revolution of the Planets,' 2022, Myers explores Turner’s understanding of himself as a vessel for special wisdom. Four disks at the corners of this tapestry...In "Knowledge of the Elements, Revolution of the Planets," 2022, Myers explores Turner’s understanding of himself as a vessel for special wisdom. Four disks at the corners of this tapestry refer to four different kinds of knowledge. The lower left disk is a representation of the Nebra Sky Disk, a star map found in the late 1990s in Germany that is said to be one of the earliest accurate depictions of the night sky (dating from c. 1600 BCE). The cluster of 7 stars depicted in brass is the Pleiades. The lower right disk is a representation of the famous cosmogram of Congo, which articulates a worldview that includes seen and unseen influences, and was carried over across the middle passage by several populations of enslaved people. The upper right disk is a hex, commonly found on barns in rural America. They are the kind of accepted rural magic that reveals the false dichotomy between European settlers, as people of ‘fact and science,’ and Africans as ‘those who believe in magic and superstition.’ The upper right-hand disk depicts an Igbo Nsbidi, which much like the more popular Adinkra symbols, was a logographic writing system of spiritual and social concepts.
This reclamation of spiritual and cosmological knowledge has special relevance for an African-American of his time, when reading itself was an outlawed practice for Black bodies. Turner is depicted at the crossroads of all four knowledge systems, an inheritor and interpreter of multiple traditions. -
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