Artist and Professor Renée Green’s Mise-en-scène: Commemorative Toile (1992-1993) is currently on view at the Art Institute of Chicago’s Contemporary Art Gallery, Gallery 295.
Surrounded by a familiar wallpaper with “strange fruit” in it, the three file boxes depicted in the images hold color-coded cards that list the names of French slave ships (blue), the languages spoken by enslaved Africans aboard (orange), and the years this commerce took place before it was officially abolished (green).
In this environment, a spirited 18th-century French baroque melody plays while toy motorboats circle endlessly in empty basins, suggesting that the triangular trade still spins the wheels of global capitalism and that our colonial past is a constant specter of our present.
A site of aesthetic reverie, Mise-en-scène: Commemorative Toile simultaneously questions the ways in which history is constructed, displayed, and inhabited in domestic and specially, in institutional settings in the Americas.
Accessioned by the Institute in 2020 [2020.346a-c], the installation was presented to the public in November 2024, and will be on view throughout 2025.
More information: Art Institute of Chicago’s collection’s website.
