When museums use artists to address their colonial histories, the results can feel superficial or clumsy. Centuries of violence can’t be mended with a single project, particularly when hampered by the short-term nature of residencies and temporary exhibitions. For When Our Rivers Meet, the product of Beatrice Glow’s residency at the New-York Historical Society, the artist does not to take on the whole history of Dutch colonialism in North America. Instead, using their collections to mark the 400th anniversary of New Amsterdam’s founding, she focuses on how the city’s foundation has been commemorated in the past, presenting herself as the latest in a line of interpreters.
It’s a smart, manageable choice for a broad theme. She draws heavily on the archive of the 1909 Hudson-Fulton Celebration, which marked the 300th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s voyage up his namesake river and the 100th anniversary of Robert Fulton recreating it. Referencing the parade floats and tableaux made for the two-week celebration, Glow, with collaborators of Dutch, Indigenous, and African heritage, created extravagant parade floats that update and reframe this colonial history. She uses VR technologies to make these floats and produces them with 3D printers, resulting in highly detailed plastic polymer sculptures. These artworks are fun: “Revolutions to Love Our More-Than-Human Relatives,” made with NYC-based Matinecock artist Tecumseh Ceaser, turns Renaissance allegories of the Four Continents into a carousel, reducing the colonial stereotypes of America, Africa, Asia, and Europe to absurd and childlike amusements.
Glow plays well with her source material, but struggles at times to stand up to it. The images of the 1909 floats are just as surreal as her artworks, depicting moving islands with tableaux of the “purchase” of Manhattan and ships being built, and a representation of the Croton Aqueduct as a Greek goddess. A small room contains a VR film that models the parade floats as an actual procession through the city, displayed alongside an 18th-century pop-up peepshow of “Constantinopel” [sic] from the NYHS collection. The latter, a paper cutout Orientalist fantasy, is another neat analogue to Glow’s digital confections, but it’s an odd choice for a show that’s so much about New York, and the film hardly enhances her parade float sculptures. In addition, the film is eight and a half minutes long, but there’s no seating in the tiny room, and it’s too cramped to get comfortable and experience it fully.
Glow also makes use of AI in “Hallucinating in the Afterimage of Empire (after Claes Janszoon Visscher),” overlaying a 1652 map with generated images of Dutch colonial exports. The comparison between the almost-real weirdness of machine-generated images and the fantastical illustrations on early modern maps is self-consciously witty: Just as the maps’ original decorations reveal their author’s prejudices and assumptions, the AI model can only repeat the colonial sources that it’s been trained on. Frustratingly, it’s not that easy to see how implausible the “hallucinations” of the AI illustrations actually are, between the distortion of the fabric it’s printed on and the reflection on the glass. But putting any reservations about the ethics of AI image making aside, it’s a cunning way to draw a parallel between the experimental technologies of the past and those of today, as the work gently nudges the viewer to consider the connections between technology and colonialism.
Progress so often comes hand in hand with exploitation. While Glow gestures toward that relationship, she stops short of examining the consequences of her own flirtation with AI tools, and the catastrophic environmental damage associated with their water consumption and carbon emissions. I found this work less compelling than the parade sculptures, or Glow’s gaudy gilt baby rattles, covered in the symbols of the Dutch West Indian Company, which serve as an allegory for the colonial histories we inherit. Her ability to bring attention to the more outlandish moments in New York’s colonial history is refreshing, and the prints and photographs from the NYHS collections displayed here are well chosen and interpreted. On the whole, it’s a clever show, but one that takes on a vast and messy history with a touch that is sometimes too light.
Beatrice Glow: When Our Rivers Meet continues at the New-York Historical Society (170 Central Park West, Upper West Side, Manhattan) through August 18. The exhibition was organized by Rebecca Klassen, curator of material culture.