#ted barrow

Winslow Homer, The Gulf Stream, 1899

It is hard to guess what Homer had in mind when painting The Gulf Stream. We want to see pathos in this representation of the [vulnerable] fisherman, and we wonder about his fate. It is an image that is freighted with suspense, the outcome forever uncertain. “You can tell [the] ladies,” Homer wrote contemptuously, “that the unfortunate negro who now is so dazed & parboiled, will be rescued & returned to his friends and home, & ever after live happily.”

Kerry James Marshall, Gulf Stream, 2003

Stacy Lynn Waddell, The Gulf Stream (after Winslow Homer), 2013

Kara Walker, “The Ship” (detail, Fons Americanus), 2019

Today, Homer’s apparent indifference to the fate of the fisherman caught in the currents has engendered the opposite: We look past the shark-filled wave to the boat, and see the sailor. Regardless of what Homer thought or didn’t think about his subject, men like this sailor lived, fished, and died along the Gulf Stream in a postbellum society that still enshrined racialized peonage and poverty. After slavery was abolished in British-controlled Nassau in 1834, Southern Florida became a destination for many Bahamians. By the time Homer began painting The Gulf Stream, for example, Miami, incorporated in 1896, had the second-largest African American population in the United States, the majority of [whom] had recently arrived from the Caribbean. In this “Magic City,” they found work in construction, stone-carving, farming, fruit-picking, dredging, and laboring along Henry Flagler’s newly built Florida East Coast Railroad connecting Miami to the Florida Keys, completed by the time the Met purchased Homer’s work. One-third of Miami’s voters were Black, but this was changing as Southern Democrats assumed control of legislative politics and imposed Jim Crow laws on a formerly enfranchised, politically active population. Such collective social histories are submerged in Homer’s aloof depiction of one man’s perilous encounter with nature.

Ted Barrow - Room 215

Ted Barrow found himself in our Hotel, checking in late at night, as most of our guests do. He came in out of the rain with a parcel under his arm. A potted plant, wrapped in a sheet. Him, slick and wet appearing like a wet cat drenching the floor of my lobby; His plant looking like a twisted ghost, slowly smothering under his arm. He had no luggage save a short  bag with his overnights in them.

BREAD 

Featuring : Pat Edge - Sweet Waste - Pryce Holmes - Tyler Tufty - Shawn Powers - Eli Reed - Josh Velez - Ted Barrow - Zeb Weisman & Zered Bassett

(Previously released as - UNTITLED - NYC SEPT. 2012) 

Filmed in NYC September 2012 by Joe Gallagher 

Super 8 by Charlie Smith & Joey Gallagher 

Edited by Joe Gallagher