A Nation Takes Place draws together a transnational collection of artwork by 38 artists to examine the connection between water and nation, water and sovereignty, and water and reimagined ecologies. While archives provide some access to the past, there are histories that have been erased, histories that remain inaccessible to language, and histories resistant to being written. In these gaps, the artists in A Nation Takes Place help us to fill in the spaces where words cannot. This exhibitions seeks to help us comprehend the complexity of the United States’ formation ,a project unthinkable without waterways, conquest, and slave ships.  The artists approach maritime art looking toward the ways that the imaginaries of seafaring are tethered to the lethal technologies of enslavement, colonialism, genocide, dispossession and extraction.