In Dewey Crumpler’s “Green Bananas,” the titular fruit wash ashore from capsized shipping containers as hermit crabs navigate the scattered cargo.
Like Crumpler’s other exhibited works — currently on display in the David C. Driskell Center as part of “Dewey Crumpler: Life Studies” — the artist highlights the exploitation of marginalized people within capitalism. Crumpler gifted his papers with sketches to the Driskell Center, which inspired the exhibition, according to Abby Eron, the center’s exhibitions and programs assistant director.
In “Green Bananas,” the containers symbolize a capitalist economy dependent on transporting international commodities. But instead of safely delivering the goods, an accident results in cargo loss, as depicted in Crumpler’s piece.
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“It is chaotic. It is overwhelming,” Sampada Aranke, the exhibit’s guest curator and a professor at Ohio State, said. “It is kind of decentering to think about the implications of the arguments or the questions that [Crumpler’s] asking.”
One crab stares at the mess of bananas, while another buries itself under a red Lego block. Like the crustaceans, humans are left to adapt to circumstances imposed by the contemporary economic system, Crumpler said in a Spotify podcast episode accompanying the exhibit.
Crumpler also connects this cargo loss to the Zong Massacre during the transatlantic slave trade, where hundreds of enslaved Africans were thrown into the ocean by their enslavers on the Zong ship and labeled as “lost at sea.”
The ship owners took out insurance for their cargo of enslaved people, and a landmark 1783 case ruled that the insurance company was liable for the losses, which determined that human cargo was the same as other goods onboard. Crumpler ties this to racial capitalism, where power and profit are prioritized over life.
In another piece, “Blueblack Nights,” a sequined shipping container, which symbolizes the wealth of capitalism, submerges into raging, dark blue ocean waves. With riches however, comes many problems, depicted by the havoc in the piece, according to Crumpler.
Crumpler also uses tulips as a motif to highlight the capitalist system’s connection to the transatlantic slave trade.
Another series of pieces, entitled “Chainsaw Prints,” depicts the machines alongside tulips painted with gentle brush strokes. The teeth of the chainsaws outline the human bodies in the British slave ship named Brooks as well as the U-shape where enslaved people sat.
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Crumpler draws similarities between the tulips, which were a valued commodity in the 17th century during the Dutch Golden Age, and enslaved Africans.
“The history of tulips became important to me because tulips had gone through a similar relationship in their history as did Black people’s bodies. They had been used for commerce,” Crumpler’s quote in the exhibit read.
Crumpler’s exhibit nudges viewers to look beyond the canvas on the wall, to the destruction that capitalism has wreaked on society.
