Post #401 – AdamRDesign.com

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"Hun", 2026 by Charlie Rauh (AUDIO)

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An Origin, 2020

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Blue (Reckitt's), 2024

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Bricks, 2024

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Bricks, 2024

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Bricks, 2024

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Bricks, 2024

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Bricks, 2024

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Caribbean Colada, 2024

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Construction 1 (1), 2018

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Edges, 2020

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Flashcards, 2018

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Found Construction, 2025

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Four Hands, 2020

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Give Yourself

The Caribbean, 2023

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Give Yourself the Caribbean again, 2023

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Kodachrome, 2022

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Lenape Celt, 2026

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Letter, 2026

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Little Trees (Dutch), 2026

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Little Trees (UK), 2026

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Little Trees (US), 2026

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Lump, 2026

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Navel, 2022

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Sugarcane, 2018

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The Jamaican National Dish, 2018

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Tile, 2025

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Transport Family Portrait, 2020

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Tree, 2020

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Untitled (Golden), 2024

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VC China (reversed), 2026

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Washington Teeth, 2026

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Wreckage, 2023

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Dining Room

Lump, Jamaican National Dish, VC China, Bricks

Recently restored, the Dining Room appears as it did during the ownership of August Van Cortlandt, who lived here after the American Revolution until 1823; the room is therefore representative of the style of the Federal Period. Set with the Van Cortlandt family china, the table is arrayed as if for a holiday feast.

However, within this presentation, there are moments of artifice. The first, architecturally, following the conventions of this interior style: the two doors set into the North Wall are fake, opening onto the brick walls of the House. The second, a moment which reveals the artifice of the decisions made to present this space – as well as others throughout the house – "realistically", promoting an idea of history that foregrounds the Van Cortlandt family’s life: the sumptuously set table is laden with fake foods, notably a lump – an unidentifiable waxen entity.

Lump (left), as well as the studio lighting highlighting the unknown object, calls attention to this artifice, while VC China (reversed) (right), a fractalized rendering of the motifs that decorate the tea set on the sideboard, breaks the allure of the wealth presented in this room. The Jamaican National Dish, a still-life of the ingredients used to make ackees and salt fish, is positioned in front of the dining table to note the ways in which the historic systems of “provisioning” used to feed enslaved African and African-descended people held on the sugar plantations of the Caribbean – a major source of the Van Cortlandt family’s wealth – still echo in the traditional Jamaican food ways.

Finally, magenta light points to the movements of enslaved African and African-descended people towards freedom through cracks in the global and local sociocultural, legal and political structures that marked them as property.

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Dutch Chamber

Four Hands, Construction, Bricks, Untitled (Golden)

This room’s interpretation dates from the time when the House’s rooms were set up as exhibition spaces rather than period rooms, as they are today. Portraying how a one-room home in lower Manhattan (then New Amsterdam) may have looked during the Dutch colonial period (1624-1664), this room is an example of the period of ahistorical romanticisation of colonial America that came after 1876, known as the Colonial Revival Movement. The objects in this room suggest ownership by a middle class family, such as that of Anne Lockermans and Oloff van Cortlandt, the progenitors of the Van Cortlandt family. In this presentation of the “humble beginnings” of the family, there is an articulation of ideals of American freedom based on commerce, capitalism, wealth, and ownership, which were influenced by the Dutch imperial mercantile system through which Oloff Van Cortlandt planted the seeds of the Van Cortlandt family’s wealth.

Similarly, these ideals are enshrined in Dutch still-life paintings contemporary to this period; their sumptuous, “natural” arrangements of oft-imported luxury items – of note are paintings in which the figure of an African or African-descended person is included among the luxury objects; the implication is that that person has been also rendered as an object, alongside tulips from Turkey, porcelain from China – are in essence advertisements for these values, and for the value of Empire.

Together, the photographs in this room (from left) Four Hands, Construction 1(1), Untitled (Golden) use the visual language of the still-life to challenge the ideas articulated in that genre of painting, and within this space. These photographs present objects – produce, products, plants and seedlings – that have been pulled into the vortex of empire, positioning them in environments populated by elements of questionable value, where the boundaries of the studio are apparent, or where breaks – glitches, lens flare, movement – in the image occur. Thus, the narratives underlying the construction of the still-life are revealed, and in so doing, reveal the narratives that ground the construction, and perpetuation of imperial logic.

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East Chamber

Blue (Reckitt's), Bricks, Edges

The lives of the women who were born, or married into, the Van Cortlandt family were intimately entwined with the lives of the African and African-descended women that the Van Cortlandt family enslaved. The daughters, wives and relatives of the Van Cortlandt family directly participated in the systems of human enslavement; the enslaved people that these women owned became property of – and part of the wealth of – the Van Cortlandt estate, or of the estates of the families into which they married, and was a way in which the Van Cortlandt women, as well as other women of this time period, were able to leverage power within the social systems of the day.

The works in this room address the ways in which the lives of the Van Cortlandt women depended on the agricultural labor, product, and wealth generated by the African and African-descended people who were owned by the Van Cortlandt family, as well as on the ownership of, and coerced care done by those people. Blue (Reckitt’s), placed in relation to a staged tea party, speaks to one external source of the family’s wealth – the commercial trade in foodstuffs produced on the Van Cortlandt estate, which were exported to Caribbean sugar colonies, in order to feel the enslaved African and African-descended working on plantations in that region.

In contrast, Edges, placed towards the back right of this room, references the internal, intimate ways in which enslavement of African and African-descended women occurred in this House, considering a moment in which, In 1821, Augustus van Cortlandt legally freed an enslaved woman, Dinah, in his will “in consideration of the great care and attention she paid to my deceased affectionate wife during her last illness.” Dinah was one of the few people whom the Van Cortlandt family manumitted during their residence on this estate. Magenta light illuminates this photograph, calling consideration to Dinah: her freedom to interiority, personhood, lived experience.

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East Parlor

Give Yourself the Caribbean, Caribbean Colada, Kodachrome, Little Trees (UK), and Give Yourself the Caribbean (again)

Give Yourself the Caribbean, Caribbean Colada, Kodachrome, Little Trees (UK), and Give Yourself the Caribbean, again (from left) intervene in this space, which was probably used by the Van Cortlandt family to host esteemed guests: members of other inter-related aristocratic New York families, George Washington, and other military officials during the Revolutionary War.

In addition to the room’s ornate architectural details, the sleek mahogany secretary, the five-legged gaming table – one of the few objects in the House that has a direct link to the Van Cortlandt Family – and the spinet all articulate the conventions of taste that were coming to the fore in this time period. These new ideas of aesthetics were part of systems of thought, knowledge and beauty constructed to delineate and separate a Modern – White European – notion of self from the realities of the enslaved bodies and labor on which this Modern world, and its wealth, depended.

Thus, the sleek lines of these pieces, which carry an aesthetic still recognized as luxury, can be considered an artifice: constructed from raw materials generated by enslaved African and African-descended laborers in the Caribbean, and carved – possibly by enslaved people – in a workshop in Rhode Island or London, the smooth edges of these luxury objects attempt to remove the element of enslavement and the enslaved body; at the same time, knowledge of the provenance of these pieces transmits an understanding of the ways in which this furniture allowed its owner to possess and transmute the Black body into presentable objects.

The photographs in this room address the ways in which narratives of the Caribbean, as a zone of paradise, were artificially constructed and maintained – through studio photography, particularly in the British Caribbean – hiding the realities of the historic and continued exploitation of the region under notions of taste, luxury, and pleasure. Studio lighting highlights the aforementioned furniture connecting this conceptual throughline to the objects of the House, while magenta light points to the movements of enslaved African and African-descended people towards freedom from objecthood, against the notion of the freedom to consume and to own.

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Introduction

Van Cortlandt House Museum

In the 100 years since Olof Van Cortlandt’s arrival in New Amsterdam in service of the Dutch West India Company – in essence, the commercial arm of the Dutch Empire – the Van Cortlandt family amassed tremendous levels of wealth and political clout. The foundation of this status was the family’s expansive trade operation, which was based in the transport and exchange of commercial goods, as well as the trafficking of enslaved African and African-descended people, between New Amsterdam (later New York) and the Caribbean, notably Jamaica.

Frederick Van Cortlandt initiated the construction of this House in 1748, on land secured by his father, Jacobus, from the local Munsee Lenape community in 1701; as the Van Cortlandt’s acquired land in this region, their holdings stretched well into Westchester County. They referred to this estate as their “plantation”; three generations of the Van Cortlandt family enslaved African and African-descended people on this property.

The House was built by those enslaved by the Van Cortlandt family. The goods – apples, butter, wheat, etc – generated on this “provisioning plantation” were farmed, packaged, and ground by those that the Van Cortlandt family enslaved; the Park’s athletic fields that lie to the north of the House were the site of much agricultural activity, while the Mill Pond is the only remnant of the flour mill constructed and operated by the people that the Van Cortlandt family enslaved. These goods from this estate were transported on ships owned by the Van Cortlandt family to the Caribbean, to feed the African and African-descended people enslaved on that region’s sugar plantations; as the owners of those sugar plantations would not set aside enough land to provide food for those whom they enslaved, much of the food eaten by those who were enslaved had to be imported. In this very lucrative exchange, the Van Cortlandt family imported the products generated by those enslaved on these sugar plantations – sugar, rum, molasses – back to New Amsterdam (later New York); they also trafficked enslaved people from Caribbean colonies to New Amsterdam (later New York). In this way, the Van Cortlandts were able to consolidate and to maintain their wealth, power and status – marrying into other wealthy families, serving in powerful political positions, etc. – while negotiating fluctuating political dynamics and loyalties across the Dutch, British and American empires.

At the end of the 19th century, the Van Cortlandt family sold the House and land to the City of New York; after being used for myriad purposes, the grounds became today’s Van Cortlandt Park, while the House became a museum in 1897. Under the stewardship of the National Society of Colonial Dames in the State of New York, the House was restored and furnished to depict how it may have looked during the period from 1749 to 1823; the designations of the House’s rooms has not been static, as ideas of the way the House functioned, and the narratives held in each space, has also changed over time. While the museum’s collections are authentic to the time period, only a small portion of them were in fact owned by the Van Cortlandt family.

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Introduction

Van Cortlandt House Museum

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Nursery

Tree, Bricks, An Origin

This room is typically styled as The Nursery, a space where enslaved African and African-descended people would have looked after toddlers and older children. The original didactics of this space reveal that “...Families in the colonial period did not typically see their newborn children as individuals – often referring to them not by sex or by name but rather as ‘it.’ Even months after babies were christened, they were commonly called “the baby’ or ‘the child.’..” The intimacy that presumably took place in this space does not erase the insurmountable divide in legal and social standing between the children and the enslaved people who cared for them. Still, a question remains: what would care have looked like from the perspective of those who shared this room, closeness between people who were considered objects, or barely human?

Tree documents a memorial created by a community of substance users who congregate not far from the artist’s studio for one of their own who recently passed. These individuals – who are barely acknowledged by most of society, except as nuisance, or number - are the ones who see each other as individuals worthy of care and memory, despite living so extremely close to the edge. An Origin, as installed here, speaks to the potentials of this deep, and deeply human way of caring for each other; while this care can happen within the compromised context of a capitalist society, how can it happen?

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The North Facing window and adjacent wall

Sugarcane and Flashcards

The time period in which the Van Cortlandt House was built, and in which the Van Cortlandt family was in residence, overlapped with the birth of the Modern World, which saw the genesis of several systems, including systems of knowledge and scientific inquiry, that were constructed to delineate and separate a Modern – White European – notion of self from the realities of the enslaved bodies and labor on which this Modern world, and its wealth, depended.

This window is the only North-facing window in the original structure of the Van Cortlandt House (the building in which the visitors center is housed was constructed many years after this property passed out of Van Cortlandt family ownership). It is thus the only window from which one could have seen the landscape and labor happening on agricultural fields – on land traditionally stewarded by the Lenape Munsee people, now the Park’s athletic fields – on which the enslaved African and African-descended people who were owned by the Van Cortlandt family generated the products for export – wheat for flour, corn etc – to Caribbean sugar colonies, in order to feel the enslaved African and African-descended working on plantations in that region, whose trade was the nucleus of the Van Cortlandt family’s wealth. The singularity of this window resonates with the Modern desire for separation, as outlined above.

Flashcards, a suite of images of featuring Caribbean produce, labelled with the vernacular names (as taught to the artist by her mother) for these fruits and vegetables is installed in this space – the card representing Sugarcane has been flipped in the framed set, but has been much enlarged and placed in the window – to call attention to the ways in which the Van Cortlandt family’s desire to partake in the wealth generated by the labor of enslaved African and African-descended people held on Caribbean plantations fueled a concomitant desire to not see the African and African-descended people who produced the products, generated on the agricultural fields, that allowed for wealth-building commerce to occur.

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The Quarters-1

Transport Family Portrait

The Quarters that housed the African and African-descended People Enslaved by the Van Cortlandt Family

The lives of enslaved African and African-descended people are often understood solely in relation to the lives of those by whom they were enslaved. In the archive, in history, the privileged perspective of the enslaver articulates the existence of enslaved people through the labor, a concept that, in its abstraction, is softened and reduced in modern understanding, and commodity value extracted from enslaved people; points of personhood held by the enslaved are stripped and devalued.

In the context of a house museum, this stripping takes a material turn. Consider the ways in which, in the intricate stagings of the rooms on the second and third floors of this House, there is an articulation of the Van Cortlandt family’s, of George Washington’s, lived experiences. The luxury objects in those rooms – especially as placed in a “neutral” domestic setting – encourage a connection to, an alignment with, the lives, histories and values of the Van Cortlandt family and of George Washington; the sparseness of these quarters imply that there cannot be a point of alignment with those who lived here. However, an African and African-diasporic – a global – culture would have been expressed within these rooms, reflecting multiplicities of culture, religion, knowledge, personhood and interiority. Within this space, ideas of freedom, self and agency would have been expressed.

These rooms are suffused magenta light, and knit together with Hum, a sound piece by Charlie Rauh; appearing in slivers, or in reverberations throughout the House, these two non-embodied articulations of lives, histories and movements towards freedom of the enslaved African and African-descended people – whose bodies, knowledge and labor are the foundation of the wealth seen below, are revealed to have their source within these chambers. Transplant Family Portrait, installed in the first room of these quarters, points to the ways in which those who have been caught in the currents of global transportation of knowledge and labor have created safety nets of survival under the shadow of a capitalist system which reduces them to commodities. In the main area of this space, Navel presents definition of freedom and power that stands in opposition to the definitions of freedom and power and wealth held by the Van Cortlandt family and by George Washington – freedom to gain wealth and power through commerce, freedom to own people – as delineated in the luxury goods populating period rooms below. The form of a cowrie shell, a potent and multi-faceted African and African-diasporic symbol of spirituality and power, stands in an imagined landscape inflected by movement and transport, while the inescapable shadow of capitalism remains. There is, as expressed in Navel’s inset image, movement towards agency, a non-commodity based notion of freedom: freedom from enslavement, and the echoes of enslavement that still bind.

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The Quarters-2

"Hun" by Charlie Rauh, Navel

The Quarters that housed the African and African-descended People Enslaved by the Van Cortlandt Family

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The Unfinished Room

Lenape Celt

Lenape Celt is an acknowledgement of the Munsee Lenape people, traditional stewards of the land on which this House was built. A celt is a stone tool; found when the agricultural fields to the North of the House were leveled into military parade grounds, following the Van Cortlandt family’s deeding of this structure and land to New York City. Museum curators surmised that the enslaved African and African-descended people who labored on those fields during the Van Cortlandt family’s tenure in this House would have encountered such objects. The original artifact rests in the quarters that housed the African and African-descended people that the Van Cortlandt Family enslaved, also on this floor.

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West Chamber

Letter, Washington Teeth, Little Trees

Not long after the Van Cortlandt House became a museum, this bedroom was dubbed the “Washington Bedroom.” It was thought to be the room in which George Washington was most likely to have slept in when he stayed at Van Cortlandt House in October 1776 and later in November 1783, just before the military action to re-take New York City from the British at the end of the Revolutionary War. The staging of Washington’s presence in this room reflects the ambitions of the Colonial Revival Movement, a period of time that came after 1876, which romanticised colonial America and the American Revolution, in its articulation of the constructed histories undergirding the foundation of American which are still circulated in the present day. These constructed histories redact swathes of truth, in favor of a narrative that locates ideals of American freedom in the bodies, lives and actions of those who “founded” this country.

These redactions range in scale from the intimate to the global. Regarding the former, the truth is that – contrary to the myth of his wooden teeth – George Washington’s dentures were constructed from the teeth of the African or African-descended people whom he enslaved. Regarding the global, the truth that George Washington, in post-war correspondence to a British general based in Canada, requested the return of “Negros and other American property” to America; these lines are in reference to the African and African-descended people who self-emancipated from their White American enslavers (including George Washington) during the Revolutionary War, fighting alongside British troops on the promise, made by that army of freedom if one survived the conflict. (It should be noted that the British deployed this tactic in an attempt to militarily destabilize the American war machine; they offered emancipation to the enslaved African or African-descended people held in bondage elsewhere in their Empire.)

Letter and Washington Teeth present the evidence of both the aforementioned correspondence and of Washington's dentures. In so doing, a gap between still-circulated constructed histories of American freedom – revealed to be based on the freedom to own people – and the actual truth of this history is revealed; concomitantly, the faint magenta outlines present on Letter highlight the histories of African and African-descended people who chose freedom from enslavement, despite the danger of war. Lastly, Little Trees (US), a collage of an air freshener bearing the flag of the United States, comments on the ways in which the histories reflected in this room are still received and echoed in the present.

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West Parlor

Wreckage, Found Construction, Little Trees (Dutch), Bricks and Tile

Wreckage, Found Construction, and Little Trees (Dutch) (from left) were installed in response to the blue- and orange-painted cabinetry present on the North wall of this room; a replication, the particular shades of these colors match those originally used to decorate these cabinets. The blue and orange were an homage to the Dutch flag, nodding to the Dutch imperial mercantile mechanism from which the Van Cortlandt family’s wealth – and ideas of freedom enshrined in the freedom to gain wealth and power through commerce – derived. These colors have persisted throughout Western culture, acting as an echo and extension of the Dutch empire; a notable example is the presence of the pairing in the logos of several New York City sports teams. This group of fragmented or machine-generated images of valueless blue-and-orange artifice skewers the implicit narrative – that of the value of empire – that occurs in the unquestioned permutation of these colors. Upturned blue and orange studio lights – “horror lighting” – highlight pieces from the permanent collection, bringing this conceptual throughline to the objects of the House.

Several Bricks are positioned within this space as well as other spaces throughout the House; alongside studio equipment and lighting, sandbags and visible wiring, these objects – made of acrylic shaped into the form of a breeze block – reinforce the return of this room, as well as other rooms in which they appear, to a constructed zone of decisions related to the history of the Van Cortlandt House.

Tile responds to the biblical stories articulated on the tiles of this room’s fireplace surround. The work documents a broken reproduction of a tile that would have appeared on the surround and depicts a biblical story of enslavement. This object is located in the third-floor quarters of the enslaved African and African-descended people who lived and worked in the House. The magenta light, a repeated motif throughout the exhibition, illuminates the image and references the ways in which enslaved African and African-descended people, keenly aware of the global and local sociocultural, legal, and political structures that marked them as property, purposefully moved toward freedom from these systems. They negotiated cracks in those structures, as well as periods of military unrest such as the American Revolution, to self-emancipate.

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Overlapping Empires by Samantha Box

Van Cortlandt House Museum Online Exhibition

DCLA and NYSCA Logos here

Credit Lines

Overlapping Empires presents Van Cortlandt House Museum as a site shaped by Dutch, British, and American imperial systems, and by conflicting notions of freedom, rather than as a neutral container of history.

Samantha Box’s contemporary still life and tableaux images – articulations of the ways in which the Caribbean has continuously been a space where concepts of labor and value, in relation to systems of empire-building have been founded and refined – have been placed throughout the House museum, installed in relation to the architecture, collection, and landscape of the House.

Following a conceptual through-line that connects the ways in which 17th-century Dutch still-life painting and its contemporary descendant, product photography, function as advertisements for empire and as justification for imperially determined histories, Box’s large-scale transparencies, ad hoc light boxes, studio lighting, equipment, and objects, accompanied by sound contributed by Charlie Rauh, create visual and sonic disruption. They return the supposedly static rooms of the House to the form of an advertising studio, revealing how, in the past, histories presented at the site were controlled and negotiated to privilege certain figures and perspectives, particularly those of the Van Cortlandt family and George Washington, over those of the Munsee Lenape people on whose lands the House stands and the enslaved African and African-descended people held by generations of the Van Cortlandt family.

Building on research and interpretation developed at Van Cortlandt House Museum over the past several years, the exhibition questions the imperial histories enshrined in the House and brings larger questions related to notions of freedom to the fore, especially during the nation’s 250th anniversary. The House presents an idea of freedom that, when disrupted, is revealed to be fraught: the Van Cortlandt family’s ideas of freedom were grounded in the freedom to engage in commerce, including the sale of human beings, while George Washington’s understanding of freedom was grounded in his freedom to own other people. In contrast, the ideas of freedom held by the people enslaved by the Van Cortlandt family were founded on freedom from: from enslavement, trafficking, forced labor, and commodification.

Overlapping Empires traces the seductive aesthetic logic through which empire, its ideas of freedom, and systems of exploitation persist, and continue to define our understanding of the world, of our lives. Rather than giving answers, this exhibition generates questions, most importantly: freedom to, or freedom from?

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Samantha Box (she/her) is a Jamaican-born, Bronx-based photographer. In her studio-based practice, she uses still-life, self-portraiture, sound, and installation to explore her intersecting diasporic Caribbean histories and identities. This work has been exhibited at the Houston Center of Photography (2019), the Andrew Freedman House (2020), Empty Set Project Space (2021), and Mana Contemporary Chicago (2021); and was the focus of her residency at the Center of Photography at Woodstock in August 2021.

Her previous documentary work focused on New York City's community of queer and TGNB youth of color, and was widely recognized, notably with a NYFA Fellowship (2010), and shown, most prominently, as part of the ICP Museum’s Perpetual Revolution (2017) exhibition. This work is part of the permanent collections of the Open Society Foundation, EN FOCO, the Museum of Fine Art Houston, and of Light Work, where she was in residence in 2015. Box holds an MFA in Advanced Photographic Studies from the International Center of Photography/Bard College (2019) and a certificate in Photojournalism and Documentary Studies from the International Center of Photography (2006). She was a member of the Bronx Museum of the Arts’ AIM Fellowship program in 2021.

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Samantha Box

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