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Ward 7 Photographer Bruce McNeil
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As a poet, patterns carry a lot of symbolic weight for me. Three years ago, I began writing articles about artists, programs and issues affiliated with the Ward 7 Arts Collaborative. As I submit my last monthly piece, it seems fitting that I end as I began: covering Ward 7’s master photographer, Bruce McNeil.
Like the collaborative and the local arts community to which he belongs, McNeil has continued to take creative risks and expand his audience’s concept of what lies within the boundaries of Ward 7. In 2006, his photographs of Kingman Island and the Metrorail bridge symbolized the collaborative’s mission to “bring out the beauty in our community.” In 2007, as part of the Anacostia Community Museum and collaborative-sponsored exhibit “A Creative Profile: Artists of the East Bank,” McNeil’s photograph “Queen Matriarch of Southeast” replaced stereotypes of “welfare queens” with a dignified portrait of an older African-American woman.
His current projects further develop his fascination with both the women and the river, but more consciously and with a greater emphasis on abstract concepts. Not coincidentally, his story picks up where the last one ended: at the Anacostia Museum.
During one of the museum’s free, public programs, McNeil heard a lecture by historian John R. Wennersten, author of “Anacostia: The Death & Life of an American River.” McNeil listened to Wennersten explain the history of the river and how it earned the dubious distinction as “America’s most polluted river,” and then met Jim Connolly, executive director of the Anacostia Watershed Society, a nonprofit devoted to preserving and restoring the river. Connolly invited the photographer to take one of the society’s free educational tours of the river, and he was amazed by what he saw along the Patuxent/Bladensburg branch.
“It was an amazing eye-opener to what the Anacostia River looks like upstream, where there’s an abundance of wildlife and river that we don’t see down river,” McNeil recalls. He snapped pelicans, egrets and other animals that can’t live amidst the pollution that characterizes the part of the Anacostia that separates us from the rest of the city. “The mere fact that the birds are there tells you that the river is still healthy. If they allow the pollution to come all the way up, then the birds would be decimated because there wouldn’t be any fish in there.”
That same summer, another Smithsonian museum exposed him to the Mami Wata, a mythic water spirit that originated in Africa and has since been carried throughout the African Atlantic and other parts of the globe. The traveling exhibit from UCLA’s Fowler Gallery spent just three months at the National Museum of African Art downtown, but its influence on McNeil’s work will last far longer.
The museum’s website describes the Mami Wata (a pidgin English term meaning “Mother Water”) as “beautiful, protective, seductive and dangerous … often portrayed as a mermaid, a snake charmer, or a combination of both … profoundly influenced by representations of ancient indigenous African water spirits, European mermaids, Hindu gods and goddesses, and Christian and Muslim saints.” European sailors and enslaved Africans brought the Mami Wata to Europe, North America, South America and the Caribbean islands, where she became identified with various deities of Afro-Caribbean religions such as Lasirèn, Yemanja and Agwe.
“She is a protector of women and sailors. And she can save you, or she can destroy you,” says McNeil. “They had early paintings and also advertisements where a white colonialist brought back a mami wata image where there was this woman who handled snakes and he pawned her off like a sideshow.” He also saw contemporary statues and paintings of the Mami Wata from across the globe: Cote d’Ivoire, Sierra Leone, Haiti and Brazil, where she is worshipped as part of the African-derived religions in those locations. He even saw stateside Mami Wata created in Los Angeles and Brooklyn. “So then I decided to create my own series of Mami Wata and use the Anacostia, which is our home river. I’m just transporting the strength and mythology of Africa to a black community.”
One of McNeil’s Mami Wata was recently showcased in Black Artists of DC’s “The BLACK Exhibit” at District of Columbia Arts Center. McNeil has conducted extensive research on the mythology surrounding the Mami Wata, and he continues to photograph a cross-section of women using digital editing techniques to superimpose them onto images of the Anacostia. “I’d like to run the gamut of age and nationality,” says McNeil. “I might try to use a little girl. I’m even going to use my mother.”
Eventually he plans to create his own Mami Wata exhibit “to keep the acknowledgment of her going. If nothing else comes out of this, at least it will force the people to inquire, who is Mami Wata?”
Equally important, as always, is to help residents and visitors alike to expand their imagination of what this community and its residents are, have been and can become in the future.
“I want to show the treasure—that’s an overused word—but the treasures of the Anacostia,” says McNeil. “I really want to turn the imagery around.”
I hope these 30-some articles have done the same. |
