08/28/2026
In this series, we offer a closer look at the pieces featured in Overlapping Empires, Samantha Box's site-wide installation at VCHM.
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Quarters of the African and African-descended People Enslaved by the Van Cortlandt Family
Van Cortlandt House Museum
On view: Transport Family Portrait, 2020; Navel, 2022.
Audio: Hum, 2024 (by Charlie Rauh).
These rooms are suffused with magenta light, and knit together with Hum, a sound piece by Charlie Rauh; appearing as reverberations throughout the House, these two non-embodied articulations of lives, histories and movements towards freedom of the enslaved African and African-descended people are revealed to have their source within these chambers. Transplant Family Portrait 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. Navel presents a definition of freedom and power that stands in opposition to the definitions of freedom and power and wealth held by the enslaver – freedom to gain wealth and power through commerce, freedom to own people – as delineated in the luxury goods populating period rooms of the House. 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, over which 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.
Text credit: Samantha Box Samantha Nalini Box
This program was supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs NYC Dept of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. VCHM’s programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
