New Haven Museum | Arts, Culture & Community | History | black history
Amistad: Retold at the New Haven Museum. Photos Kapp Singer.
A bright red line tacks back and forth across the North Atlantic. It begins in Havana, jutting out from beneath Florida’s extended leg before winding through the Bahamas and up the Eastern Seaboard. Just off the tip of Long Island Sound, it terminates.
“There’s a story of resistance in that zig-zag line,” said Joanna Steinberg, the director of learning and engagement at the New Haven Museum. “It was an attempt to return home from the very beginning.”
The line charts the path of La Amistad, a slave transport ship which, in July 1839, was seized and redirected by a group of African captives who were being forcibly moved from Havana to a sugar plantation near Puerto Príncipe, Cuba. This is a story well known to New Haveners, and one which has been widely commemorated, from the Amistad Center to stops on the Connecticut Freedom Trail. A new exhibition at the New Haven Museum, entitled Amistad: Retold, presents the revolt and its historical consequences with a focus on the captives themselves.
The show begins by recounting how Sengbe Pieh, a Mende rice farmer, led the group of enslaved Africans in their attempt to take control of the vessel. After a night of violent struggle, Pieh ordered the Spanish slaveholders on board, José Ruiz and Pedro Montes, to sail back to Sierra Leone, from where the captives had been taken. During the day, they headed east towards Africa, but at night, Ruiz and Montes covertly turned the ship the other direction. After several weeks of this back-and-forth, La Amistad was intercepted by a U.S. Navy vessel off Montauk. The captives were then brought to New Haven, where they were tried for their crimes of pirating the ship and imprisoned.
Amistad: Retold updates the museum’s previous exhibition about the slave revolt, which opened in 1989 on the 150th anniversary of the ship being taken over and has been a fixture of the New Haven Museum ever since. (It was renovated in 1997 to include new material in the museum’s collection.) The goal of the new permanent exhibition, which is also available in an online format, was to incorporate new scholarship that has been published over the last three decades, and to expand the purview of the show beyond its previous focus on the trials that occurred in Connecticut.
“We wanted to center the stories of the people who led the Amistad revolt, know more about their lives in Sierra Leone, and know much more about the global context,” Steinberg said. To assemble the exhibit, she worked with the museum’s Director of Photo Archives Jason Bischoff-Wurstle and consulted with historians and educators from Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, the University of Connecticut, the Amistad Committee and the New Haven Public Schools.
Steinberg held a series of workshops with students to learn what else they were curious about, using material from the original exhibition to prompt reflection. As students asked questions about other slave rebellions and longer histories of abolition, Steinberg realized that the exhibit would benefit from an expanded historical scope.
“We needed to foreground stories of resistance on a global scale,” she said.
“That the slave trade was clearly illegal in the moment that it was happening is eye-opening,” Steinberg said. In 1817, Spain and the United Kingdom signed a treaty banning the transatlantic slave trade. Yet as the exhibit points out, trafficking between West Africa and the Caribbean continued. An animated map of slave ships sailing across the Middle Passage over a period of 350 years, made by the SlaveVoyages project, visualizes the staggering volume of human beings forcibly transported in flagrant disregard of the law.
Such striking statistics provide a framework for understanding the immense historical tides that those on La Amistad revolted against. But the exhibit also dives into the personal lives of the captives and their supporters in Connecticut. It highlights children who were on the ship, abolitionists who helped organize the legal defense in the trials, and translators who were instrumental in helping the captives tell their stories.
Amistad: Retold also examines the role that visual art played in both the initial reception of the revolt as well as the establishment of historical consciousness around the event. A large portrait of Pieh—known to the Spanish as Joseph Cinqué—remains a centerpiece of the show. Painted by Nathaniel Jocelyn (brother of prominent New Haven abolitionist Simeon Jocelyn), the piece was unusual for its time in how it depicted Pieh as a strong, confident, calm, and, most significantly, a free man.
Simeon Jocelyn's portrait of Sengbe Pieh (Joseph Clinqué).
Such symbolism made a stir in the art world; in 1841, the Artist Fund Society of Philadelphia refused to display the portrait on the grounds that it “might prove injurious to both the proprietors and the institution,” and Jocelyn resigned from the society in protest. Pieh, for his part, returned to his homeland the following year after a landmark Supreme Court decision ruled he and the other captives had been illegally kidnapped and sold.
The last section of the show, “Legacy,” augments Jocelyn’s portrait with a number of more contemporary depictions of the figures of La Amistad. Pieh’s likeness can be seen on a Sierra Leonean bank note and on the cover of a 1970 comic book about African American history, capturing the leader’s iconic status across the Black Atlantic.
Portrayals of Pieh and Jacob Lawrence's Revolt on the Amistad.
Jacob Lawrence’s large serigraph Revolt on the Amistad (1989) has the final word of the show. A new acquisition for the museum, the piece depicts a bright, chaotic abstraction of arms and legs, hands and knives. A tumultuous sea rises up at the base of the composition, but the sky above is pure and even, with a bank of fluffy white clouds. The muted browns of the ship’s deck and hull flank the right and left sides of the print, framing the colorful mass erupting in the middle.
This is a painting about release—about the beauty and pain of a moment in which hundreds of years of violence are overcome.
“Artists themselves have been retelling this story for a very long time,” said Steinberg, “raising awareness in the time in which they lived, and also continuing those conversations.”