At Sea: In Word and Image

A fascinating pairing of art history and poetry, At Sea offers a new vision of the mystery, danger, and beauty of the ocean and the horizon, engaging with this eternal topic like never before.

For millennia we have been in awe of the sea: sometimes enigmatically placid, sometimes jagged with sudden storms. In response to one of art’s most compelling subjects, At Sea presents more than sixty works dating from the nineteenth century to the present, from Gustave Courbet and J. M. W. Turner to Vija Celmins, Raymond Pettibon, and Wolfgang Tillmans. These works differ in media and approach, but together ask social, political, and environmental questions that resonate forcefully today.

Interspersed throughout are poems by two highly acclaimed writers and voices of our time, Valzhyna Mort and Ishion Hutchinson, who bring their own personal experiences of the sea. Mort grew up in Minsk, the capital city of land-locked Belarus. She remembers as a child crying herself to sleep with a photograph of the ocean in her hands. Ishion Hutchinson was raised on the waters of the Caribbean sea. Together, this unique combination of words and images remind us that the sea, a constant throughout the ages, is also always an urgent portrait of our time.