In Search of New Ground: Black Art and the Natural World

Some of my earliest memories of the natural world come from my experiences camping in northern Ontario as a child. Camping wasn’t my idea of fun. It was my mother’s initiative. She had some inkling—if not a fully fleshed-out notion—that such experiences might be good for me, might give me access to another world, might set me apart. So, over a string of summers, until the age of eleven, she packed me off to spend a week or two among dense forests, log cabins, lakes, insects, campfires, and white people. 

The natural world was, and mostly remains, a mystery to me. As a child, I could not approach it with the same sense of confidence that my fellow campers did. For me, the forest was bewildering, and full of fear. Claiming a love for the outdoors was something white people did with ease. As a child, I had no understanding, no sense that the land we tramped and scavenged around on was stolen land. I had no clue that my fellow campers’ claims of belonging were as tenuous as the deciduous leaves we pushed through. 

My only goal during these camping trips was to make it back to my mother and sister, to my home, my neighbourhood, where the familiar sight of storefront plazas, busy street corners, and the din of traffic brought relief, like a balm to my frayed nerves. Above all else, I wanted to survive. 

It took me some time to come to any kind of understanding about the complex relationships between Black people and the natural world. It wasn’t until my adult years that I realized those relations run deep and are underscored and influenced by multiple and sometimes overlapping histories and cultural contexts. It took distance, time, and experience to understand that, for Black people in the Americas, soil, fields, trees, vegetation, fauna, fora, and waterways are inextricably linked to a memory of slavery, a memory that has indelibly marked our experience of nature. The land may be beautiful, even tranquil, but to Black people, it also signifies broken promises, exhaustion, displacement, bodily danger, fugitivity, and death. While European settlers viewed, and possibly still perceive, the new world as an “empty” space primed for conquest, control, and extraction, Black people often recall land as a site of labour, of punishment, and bondage. After all, it was our large-scale refusal to return to field labour that propelled our migrations away from agriculture in the post-Emancipation period. 

I want to resist the idea—even if momentarily—that nature represents a kind of menace for Black people. That would be a truncated and misleading account. Growing up as I did, spending summer vacations in Barbados, the land also held a wholly different meaning that was, in many ways, wonderful and affirming. In this context, the natural world was sun-glazed beaches, whispering gooseberry trees, colourful birds, pesky lizards, and thick cane fields like the one surrounding my grandmother’s home, providing a sense of enclosure and protection. Nature here meant something entirely different than it did in the forests of Ontario. On the island I felt nourished, not intimidated. The natural world provided a sense of belonging, continuity, and connection. However, moving across the island, in the long shadow of slavery, it was impossible to stand, say, on the east coast, looking out at the rolling surf, and not to contemplate the slave ships docking there centuries before, my ancestors emerging from the ship’s hold, into the blinding sun, and the horrors awaiting them in the new world. Here, the natural world was in me. I was a part of the natural world. 

It was art that shaped and deepened my understanding of the nuances and fissures that come with our associations with the outdoors. It was art that gave me a way to see the world around me. I cannot look at trees in a quiet forest without hearing Billie Holiday singing Strange Fruit, without thinking of its haunting invocation of lynching. I cannot look out at the expanse of the Caribbean Sea and fail to remember the Middle Passage—that ancestral crossing of the Atlantic that still haunts—or Derek Walcott’s enduring line, “the sea is history.”​​¹ Black artists have always responded to tensions between Black people and the natural world. They play a critical role in showing us how our interpretations of nature come loaded with historical and cultural associations. Often their works point to ways in which Black life has been constrained by our environments, how notions of freedom and autonomy meet interdictions when we enter the landscape. I am thinking here of Dionne Brand’s Land to Light On, where the poet finds herself alone on a country road, her idea of belonging to the land rattled: 

If you come out and you see nothing recognisable, 
If the stars stark and brazen like glass, 
Already done decide you cannot read them. 
If the trees don’t fower and colour refuse to limn 
when a white man in a red truck on a rural road 
jumps out at you, screaming his exact hatred 
of the world, his faith extravagant and earnest…​​²

or

I lift my head in the cold and I get confuse. 
It quiet here when is night, and is only me 
and the quiet. I try to say a word but it fall. Fall 
like stony air. I stand up there but nothing 
happen, just a bank of air like a wall…​​³

Brand renders the rural Ontario landscape hostile, lonesome, and foreign. To “see nothing recognisable” and to have your surroundings unreadable, is to be perpetually adrift in your environment, searching for something or someone to be a wayfnding signpost. Reading Brand’s poem, I immediately think of those isolating experiences in the Ontario wilderness where I, too, could fnd no sense of place. 

And yet in other artistic treatments, the natural world provides sanctuary for Black people to gather our senses. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Baby Sugg’s sermon takes place in a clearing in the forest. 

Beneath sheltering pines, Baby Sugg encourages the fugitive slaves gathered to remember and attend to all that has been broken and left asunder by slavery: 

“Here,” she said, “in this here place, we fesh; fesh that weeps, laughs; fesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your fesh. They despise it.”​​⁴

Baby Sugg’s sermon is a call for healing where the almost-free can come into awareness of their bodies, their aliveness, their being. Within the clearing, they dance, laugh, and cry. The space offers protection, a place to reconnect to self and community. As Rinaldo Walcott has pointed out, the sermon in the clearing is a call to commune with the possibilities of a “freedom to come”.​​⁵

Slavery, then, has left Black people with a range of interpretations of the natural world. It remains a shape-shifting subject that refuses any singular reading. In her book Demonic Grounds, Katherine McKittrick reminds us that geography is never static, is never a one-dimensional “just is” feature in the lives of Black people. Instead, we “produce space, we produce its meanings, and work very hard to make geography what it is.”​​⁶

Over the last decade, this ongoing engagement with the natural world has underscored a significant resurgence in Black artists who have directly or indirectly used the visual register to take up these fraught entanglements with the environment. I think of this artistic thrust emerging into two broad conceptual groupings. 

In the first group, Black artists use images of Black people in nature to push back against preconceived notions of belonging and unbelonging. They produce work that challenges the white gaze that continues to find them “out of place”. Or, to cite McKittrick again, they strive to challenge the notion of “surprise” that always seems to accompany acknowledgments of Black presences in nature. These works suggest: “we have always been here, but you refuse to see us!” to the charge of newness. 

In the second camp, Black artists take up the natural world metaphorically, exploring ways in which our surroundings influence notions of memory, identity, and socio-geo-political contexts. Ideas related to erasure, absence, and positionality are submerged to allow for interior ruminations on Black life. 

Donavon Smallwood’s photo series, Languor (2020), which was partly inspired by the photographer’s search for outdoor space during the pandemic, shows Black people who he met casually in New York City’s Central Park. Smallwood grew up in Harlem and was accustomed to taking up space near the park’s glades and ravines. He was also aware of the park’s history, the story of Seneca Village, a 19th-century Black community, which existed near the rural outskirts of Manhattan, before it was razed to create the park. His black and white portraits show Black people in candid and relaxed poses. They appear languid, nonplussed, as though the camera has captured them at various moments of peak leisure. Smallwood’s images attest to Black people finding time: time for themselves, time away from the city, time out of view from prying or surveillance-focused eyes. Like Baby Sugg’s sermon in the clearing, Smallwood’s images give us Black people in tune with themselves, with their surroundings, in the process of making themselves whole. Beyond the tree lines in Smallwood’s images, buildings loom, reminding the viewer of the trouble “out there”, beyond the clearing. These structural intrusions make it near impossible to forget incidents like the Central Park Nine or Amy Cooper: cases that have marked the park as potentially unsafe for Black people.​​⁷ And yet Smallwood’s images posit a Black persistence in the face of what constantly surrounds and threatens. 

In Xaviera Simmons’ Denver (2008), a Black woman casts a fishing rod in the middle of a creek against a mountainous landscape. The setting is majestic. It brims with the earth’s bounty. Simmons’ character represents a Black woman at ease in a rugged setting. The image is striking because it counters a range of tropes about Black women in particular and Black people in general. Simmons takes a scene reminiscent of the Humber River School painters and inserts a performative feature that asks the viewer to reimagine not only the woman’s Black presence, but what she chooses to do with her body. The image asks us to set aside notions of who Black women are, what they do, and where they belong. In doing so, it challenges us to think anew about Black relations with the natural world. 

In their work, Smallwood and Simmons address the unexpected. They are interested in showing Black people in spaces and holding postures that are thought of as atypical. And while they are effective in helping me to think about the limitations placed on Black life, or to borrow Saidiya Hartman’s phrase, how they echo the “burdened individuality” that constrains what Black people can and cannot do in the “afterlife of slavery”—I’m also struck by the implications of what it means to constantly take up this opposition to the white gaze. What does it mean to always be explaining one’s presence in relation to the environment? What does it mean to constantly draw attention to one’s embodied existence, as though it was ever in question? And what would it mean to take up the subject of Black people in nature without having to tackle questions of how our lives are explicitly or implicitly seen or considered through the white gaze? Is there a way to escape this binary? Is it possible to have Black art that is concerned with our relations with nature to simply show us as we are? 

In Sandra Brewster’s photo-based transfer mural, Dense (20212022), the artist addresses how the natural world comes to form part of the memories that shape our understanding of our past and our becoming. The images, streaked with colour suggesting red sediment and silt, show the Essequibo River in Guyana on an east wall and a collage of Canadian and Guyanese forests on the west wall. These are mysterious and opaque spaces, ones that have nonetheless shaped the artist’s sense of belonging through stories told by relatives. Brewster’s mural creates an immersive entry into the power of memory, landscapes, migration, and cultural heritage. Here, the natural world becomes a metaphor for movement and change rather than a polemical claim for presence. Concern for the outsider is muted in this work. Instead, we are drawn into the intimacy of remembered space and its enduring influence over our lives. Brewster’s image of nature surfaces an important question: are metaphors one way that Black artists can take up nature as a subject while evading exhausted discourses regarding the white gaze? Paradoxically, perhaps it is a landscape image that absents Black figures that allows us to think and interpret more imaginatively beyond the confines of imposed notions of identity and place. 

Hurvin Anderson’s painting, Limestone Wall (2020), shows leafy foliage threatening to subsume an abandoned structure somewhere in rural Jamaica. I think of some ambitious entrepreneur who made an attempt at establishing a viable business, only to have the effort come to nothing. Through both figurative and abstract rendering, Anderson shows the natural world consuming what humans have wrought. The Caribbean is a place of fits and starts, in tune with the rhythms of money, climate, and tourists. Unpeopled and stark as the scene is, the work manages to convey an intensely intimate point-of-view. The work takes me back to the countryside in Barbados, to fields and gullies fecked with half-built houses mounted on concrete slabs. Anderson’s painting takes us into our struggle with nature, with our expectations, with hopes for progress. While Black people aren’t depicted here, we recognize our concern for abandoned goals, of dreams deferred. We sense an undoing of our ambition, lost to forces external to us. 

Those difficult childhood camping adventures set in motion ideas that estranged me from forests, woods, and trails. I fell into believing that those spaces were not meant for me. Encountering the work of Black artists has altered the way I view and think about ecology. These artists, through their creative labour that responds to the legacy of slavery, have provided me with new ways of perceiving the outdoors. Whether through placing Black people in unexpected settings to counter pre-conceived notions of belonging, or mining metaphorical possibilities of memory and place, Black artists continue to explore our relationship with nature in provocative ways, helping us to re-imagine nature and our place within it. 

Neil Price is a writer, educator, and editor. His writing has appeared in NOW Magazine, The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Hazlitt, Canadian Art, The Conversation, Ocula Magazine, and THIS Magazine, among other publications. He is the former Reviews Editor at Humber Literary Review. He lives in Toronto. 

1. Derek Walcott, ”The Sea Is History,” The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948–2013 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014), 253.
2. Dionne Brand, Land to Light On (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997), 4.
3. Brand, Land to Light On.
4. Toni Morrison, Beloved New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 89.
5. Rinaldo Walcott, The Long Emancipation: Moving Toward Black Freedom (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021).
6. Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
7. Amy Cooper incident: “White woman who called police on Black birder in NYC’s Central Park charged with filing false report,” CBC, July 6, 2020, https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/white-woman-amy-cooper-nyc-central-park-charged-1.5639272.

This article is published in issue 39.2 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue