In the exhibition, Moments of Being, Anina Major continues to engage with Bahamian plaiting as a contemporary practice and considers how states of awareness emerge through the body. African traditions and European influences learned from interrupted rituals, displaced materials, and symbols carried forward without full archival continuity, manifest into sculpture and performance. Resulting in a unique body of work composed of diverse forms, that are both autobiographical and fantastical. By using abstraction, voids in the archive become the place for critical reinvention and renewed cultural work. Within the woven layers rests the significance of preserving cultural memory while simultaneously embodying the complexity of identity. Major’s material of choice, clay, embodies a desire for beauty and a need to commemorate. A seemingly appropriate response to everything that is decaying and growing, that may seem to be destroyed but could never be erased.
This is most notably expressed in Major’s sculptural performance video, These Boots Were Made For Walking, a meditation of fractured cultural connections across the Black diaspora, that adopts body movement as an expression of agency and a form of problem solving. By walking and prancing across a bed of crushed conch and oyster shells interspersed with ceramic mammy shards, Major embraces ruin as a signifier of temporal in‑between‑ness. The performance memorializes the fragility of lost histories while materializing the delicate tension between destruction and perseverance. In contrast the silent architecture of The Forgotten Maidens, a congregation of bodily towers, creates a collective presence, rather than singular monumentality. Their communal stillness heightens the transference of knowledge that occurs within the work.
These moments emerge not as fixed narratives but as points that coalesce. The body remembers what the archive cannot hold.
Anina Major is a Bahamian born artist currently living and working in upstate New York. She holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and has been exhibited internationally in the United States, The Bahamas and Europe. Her work can be found in permanent collections including the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Carnegie Museum of Art, RISD Museum, and the National Gallery of the Bahamas. She has exhibited in museums and galleries internationally, including Mass MoCA, Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid, Spain; New Museum, New York, NY; National Gallery of The Bahamas, Nassau, Bahamas; and DeCordova Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA. Major is also the recipient of numerous awards and residencies, including the USA Art Fellowship, the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize, and the Armory show Pommery Prize.
