Explore the Interpretation of this artwork, Great America (painting).
The National Gallery of Art, where Great America was exhibited in 2013, has described its meaning as: "This painting reimagines a boat ride into a haunted tunnel at an amusement park as the Middle Passage—the forced journey of slaves from Africa to the Americas. What might in other hands be a work of heavy irony becomes instead a delicate interweaving of the histories of painting and race. The canvas, which is stretched directly onto the wall, creates a screen or backdrop onto which viewers project their own associations triggered by the powerful imagery."Writing about the painting in The Wall Street Journal, Kelly Crow expands upon the idea of the canvas as an amusement park scene, with a group of black people aboard the "Tunnel of Love" boat ride. Crow explains:"At first glance, the work's brightly colored palette makes everything seem merry, but Mr. Marshall fills his tunnel with ghostly, hooded shapes that evoke the Ku Klux Klan. The passengers are also crammed into the boat in a way that's reminiscent of the Middle Passage, the centurieslong slave trade that involved shipping kidnapped Africans to the New World."The Washington Post said of the painting:"On closer inspection, in fact, the figures are not smiling. They don’t seem to be having the least bit of fun. Nor is this body of water upon which they sail some fun-house lagoon; there are suggestions of turbulence and depth, and mountains in the distance. This is an ocean, it dawns on us, the Atlantic Ocean. And if the people in the boat are contemporary Americans at leisure, they are also their ancestors embarked on the middle passage, the tragic voyage that brought them here from Africa in shackles.Marhsall himself has said Great American is about, "both the transatlantic slave trade and what it means for present-day black people to be Americans."
American National Gallery of Art Middle Passage