Celebrating Black Mermaids: From Africa to America

The exhibit features the work of dozens of esteemed and award-winning fiber artists from across the United States, whose mixed-media works celebrate African goddesses as mermaid and water spirit, honoring the past and exploring them anew. The show’s theme contextualizes black mermaids through the history and belief systems of those forcibly removed from Africa and carried across the ocean. “Black mermaids traveled with enslaved Africans from Yoruba, West Africa, to distant lands, comforting them in the holds of the slave ships that took them far away from their homeland in Africa,” says Washington. “Because of the rich oral traditions of these peoples, few if any of these stories were written down until they were recorded by collectors of folk tales toward the end of the 19th century. The fine artistry in Celebrating Black Mermaids: From Africa to America is griot in nature. Each piece is a storyteller, using color, texture, form and embellishment to express a narrative.”

African merfolk first appeared in the millennia-old belief of the dwelling of water spirits in Western Africa, she explains. With the increasing contact between Europe and Africa of the time, these legends eventually combined with traditional European myths of mermaids. Thus, African water-spirits evolved from a representation as half-human, half-creature, to being popularly depicted as a half-fish, half-woman. With the arrival of enslaved Africans on the Atlantic slave trade, the traditions, beliefs, and practices of honoring ancestral water deities were transplanted into the United States. Tales of capricious female water spirits evolved into stories describing anything from wrathful sea creatures brewing great storms to harm the Carolina Sea Islands to mermaids acting as obliging “fairy-godmothers.”

Curated by Cookie Washington

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