Pigment print of a woman who appears to defy gravity and float; hovering in a muted underwater realm. Her eyes are closed serenely, as if asleep, with arms resting comfortably down the sides of a billowing, voluminous fringed skirt that swishes in spite of her stillness. She wears a finely beaded corset and her shoulders, neck, and chin are covered with a patent snakeskin material cinched by a small chain around the neck. Her hair is braided into an intricate updo; crowning her white-painted face.

Cascading Celestial Giant I

Ayana V. Jackson

Date: 2019

Object Type: Photograph

Material/Technique: pigment print, archival; paper, German etching paper

Dimensions: 73 5/8 H x 59 1/8 W in

Accession No: 2020.2.1

Credit Line: Courtesy of the Artist and Mariane Ibrahim

Credit Line: Museum Purchase


Description: This work is part of Ayana Jackson's Drexciya series, which references the name of a 1990s Detroit band. In its music, the band developed an Afrofuturist myth about an underwater country populated by the unborn children of pregnant African women who were thrown overboard from slave ships. In the band’s mythology, those children adapted to breathe underwater and built their own civilization at the bottom of the ocean. Jackson's work likewise suggests an alternative history of the transatlantic journey of enslaved people known as the Middle Passage. To tell this story from a Black perspective, her photograph draws visually on African artistic and cultural practices. The figure’s raffia-like skirt, coiffure, and painted white face connect it to masquerade traditions found across the African continent. The figure also evokes widespread African beliefs in ancestral spirits which impact present-day affairs. Such ancestral haunting, Jackson seems to suggest, remains relevant to Black diasporic experience to this day.

Exhibitions: Bare It All, Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, 08/27/2026 Ulrich Co-Lab Phase 1, Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, 01/25/2024 - 06/08/2024 Art is a Superpower!, Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, 05/20/2021 - 07/31/2021

Series/Portfolio: edition 5/8