"This monumental triptych is a brilliant summation of Scherezade García’s concerns with history, hybridity, migration, and memory. An interdisciplinary artist, García moved from the Dominican Republic to New York in 1986 to attend Parsons School of Design. Her dual identity as an islander has made her keenly aware of the role of the ocean to connect and divide people. Water becomes the stage of her exuberant, color-filled compositions, and a vector of the diasporic experience of her own community and beyond. This 'liquid highway,' as the artist has described it, bridges people, their hopes, and their dreams. But the fluid medium has also enabled and hampered a long history of migration in the Americas—often violent and perilous—including the transatlantic slave trade (which formally ceased in the 19th century) and in more recent times the sea journeys of countless Caribbean islanders to the United States in search of a better life. 'I see water as an obstacle which we need to navigate and cross, as a mass of water that carries our history, memories, DNA,' García has said."
July 25, 2025
1
of 128
