Annalee Davis: 'More Tender Geographiesat 30 West Dale Street

Barbadian artist Annalee Davis’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States, More Tender Geographies, brings together more than thirty works spanning a decade of the artist’s practice. Davis examines what she calls a “post-plantation landscape” through a process by which she looks to land to explore evidence of rupture, care, resistance, and survival. Barbados, a southern Caribbean nation, was first colonized in 1627, then finally gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1966 and became a republic in 2021. Its social and ecological history shapes Davis’s sustained attention to land, labor, and cultural heritage. On view are works in which Davis incorporates materials found on her family’s property, a working dairy farm that formerly operated as a sugar plantation. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pottery sherds likely used by both plantation owners and enslaved laborers are visible in Davis’s (bush) Tea Services, which she has used for distilling teas from local plants, fostering discussions about extraction, disintegration, and ecological devastation on the island. Ledger papers left behind on the property became the substrates in a suite of drawings of plants…