Billy Gérard Frank – The Sea Is History . . .

 One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.

—André Gide

I was born on Petite Martinique, the smallest of Grenada’s sister isles, situated in the Grenadines archipelago between Saint Vincent and Grenada in the Lesser Antilles. Petite Martinique and the neighboring island of Carriacou share similar seafaring and agricultural economies, as well as embodied memories of traditional rituals and Creole heritages connected to our African, French, and Scottish ancestors. These histories continue to live through the music, songs, dances, rituals, and crafts handed down across generations, with boatbuilding and shipwrighting being one of them.

My father was a highly sought-after boatbuilder, sailor, and fisherman on the island. From my earliest years, growing up within this seafaring community, my imagination was nurtured by its rituals, traditions, and stories of distant places and voyages, stories that seemed to rise from the fecund depths of the ocean. These narratives spoke not only of adventure and wonder but also of grief and loss, as many of my relatives had lost their lives at sea in hurricanes and storms that were a constant presence in that hemisphere.

Growing up in a seafaring community, I saw the ocean as more than simply a body of water. It was a vast archive of maritime routes connecting the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa, while also binding my ancestors. Some of my earliest memories of maps and cartography stem from watching my father and my uncles sitting around in the evenings drinking rum, maps spread out and compasses and measuring instruments in hand, charting their next journey out to sea, while the women helped the men to mend sails. I remember these rituals with a particular sense of melancholy and longing because their preparations for departure also marked a separation from home and the family, the beginning of long stretches of time when my father and the community of men would be away at sea. And then there was the anticipation of letters with foreign stamps: Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuela, Aruba, Guyana, other regions of South America, and the US Virgin Islands.

Derek Walcott poignantly asks in his poem “The Sea Is History”: “where is your tribal memory?” For me, that memory resides not only in the land and sea, but also in the routes, departures, absences, and migrations that have shaped my family history. Maps have long come to hold the effigies of exile, and a call to the distant and the unknown. Many members of my family, including uncles and aunts, migrated abroad beginning in the 1950s. Some traveled to England aboard the MV Empire Windrush during the Windrush generation, as thousands of West Indians migrated to Britain—the mother country—in search of new possibilities. Others later migrated to America. These movements across the Atlantic became part of my own inheritance of departure and exile, as I too left as a teenager, lived in the great metropolises of London, New York, Paris, and, presently, in Berlin, where I reside.

Over the last six years, particularly since my 2019 Venice Biennale project, Second Eulogy: Mind the Gap, as an artist representing the Grenada National Pavilion, an autobiographical intervention has brought me back home to the place of my youth after an exile of over eighteen years to make work that explores familiar themes of memory, exile, place, and the errant trajectory of my life vis-à-vis my father’s. As Édouard Glissant writes in Poetics of Relation: “the tale of errantry is the tale of Relation.” Through my father’s personal effects—suitcase, maps, letters, passports—I brought our lives into closer conversation, tracing the shared waywardness of our journeys through the world, exhibiting the very maps and instruments that were once a wonder in the child’s imagination at the world’s stage of the art world in Venice.

My 2022 Venice Biennale project, Palimpsest: Tales Spun From Sea and Memories, extended this inquiry into the history of the transatlantic slave trade through fragments from the life and journeys of Ottobah Cugoano. Kidnapped in West Africa and enslaved in Grenada before being taken to England, Cugoano reclaimed his voice and freedom as an enslaved man to emerge as one of the most significant abolitionists of the time.

Maps and cartography have become important materials and conceptual frameworks within my multidisciplinary practice. I approach them simultaneously as historical fragments, archives, and repositories of memory. Still, I approach them also as unstable and errant forms, objects that reveal as much through what they omit, distort, or leave unmapped as they do through what they claim to document.

Most recently, this investigation has taken me to Maine, a place that has held great interest for me since I worked as a studio assistant to the artist John Hultberg in New York in the early 1990s. Hultberg was once married to the artist Lynne Drexler, and he maintained deep ties to and a great fondness for Maine. I am also particularly drawn to the state because of its boating, fishing, shipbuilding, and maritime histories, which resonate deeply with my own upbringing.

In 2022, I returned to Maine while exhibiting my 2019 Venice Biennale project at Moss Galleries. Around that time, I began developing a new body of work—Indigo: Entanglements—at Wolfe Editions with printmaker David Wolfe in Portland, who was introduced to me by artist Charlie Hewitt. Through this series, I began examining Maine’s place within the broader history of the transatlantic slave trade, particularly through its shipbuilding industry, maritime networks, and economy. Several works from the series are now held in Maine collections, including those of the Farnsworth Art Museum and the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education.

I use indigo as a pigment not only for its deep, luminous blue, but for the histories: cultivated and harvested through the labor of enslaved Africans in the Caribbean and the American South, indigo was a valuable commodity within the machinery of colonial expansion. Its beauty is inseparable from the violence and exploitation that produced it. In each painting in the series, maps, vintage African fabrics, newsprint, acrylic, and other materials are incorporated to create counter-narrative and speculation to decode and reinterpret the entangled history that is the transatlantic slave trade.

For example, in Indigo: Entanglements No. 6 (now in the collection of the Osher Map Library), layered historical signifiers create a contested portrait, a cartography of Maine and Massachusetts and the wider Atlantic world: a John Singleton Copley portrait of the Pepperrell family, whose wealth and prominence were connected to commerce, colonial power, and enslavement and the formerly enslaved African-American man Anthony Burns, who escaped from slavery in Virginia in 1854. Burns’ capture and trial in Boston, and transport back to Virginia, generated wide-scale public outrage in the North and increased support for abolition; the poet and abolitionist Phillis Wheatley; references to the Royal African Company; and a 1719 bill of lading documenting the transport of an enslaved woman from Barbados to William Pepperrell. These fragments intersect with Maine’s eastern white pine and Willem Blaeu’s seventeenth-century map of Africa, linking the state’s forests, shipbuilding economy, and maritime networks to colonial trade and the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans. Together, these overlapping images unsettle the authority of the original portrait, revealing the people, materials, and histories obscured beneath its representation of wealth and power.

In the spring of 2025, I was awarded the Osher Map Library’s inaugural Peggy L. Osher Visiting Artist Fellowship. The fellowship allowed me to engage closely with significant maps in the collection, deepening my research and expanding the Indigo: Entanglements series in preparation for a forthcoming exhibition in 2027 at the Farnsworth Art Museum in collaboration with partners including the Osher Map Library.

My work and research subsequently led me to Amsterdam in the spring of 2026, where I undertook a fellowship at the Thami Mnyele Foundation exploring the Netherlands’ entangled relationship with the transatlantic slave trade. As Amsterdam was once a global center of mapmaking and cartographic production, it felt especially fitting that my research and practice should bring me into such proximity to one of the historical birthplaces of modern cartography.

This engagement with maps is deeply connected to my transnational experience and to histories of migration, displacement, memory, and the entanglements produced by the transatlantic slave trade. Through my work as an artist, educator, and curator, I continue to investigate how these histories remain embodied, carried across oceans and generations, and embedded within the cultural practices, stories, landscapes, and memories that shape who we are. Most importantly, this work returns me to my birthplace, to my father, and to the generations of sailors and seafarers who ignited in me a desire for adventure and the distant horizon. In the words of Édouard Glissant, “our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone”, an image that speaks to my own journey outward while remaining deeply connected to the waters, histories, and people from which I emerged.