River Spirits of the Anacostia (2004)
- Partners for Historical Justice
- Jan 14
- 6 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
Title of work
River Spirits of the Anacostia (2004)
Artist
Martha Jackson-Jarvis
Location
Exterior upper walls of the Anacostia Metro Station, 1101 Howard Rd SE. Washington, DC 20020, Howard Street mezzanine.
Visual description
This large-scale frieze (glass tesserae & stone mosaic) wraps around the four upper outer walls, immediately below the roof line of the Anacostia Metro station, an important station on the national capital area’s light rail transit system. 400 feet long, 4.5 feet high. Created out of 52 mosaic panels, the work evokes the geological, biological, and cultural history of the Anacostia River (Eastern Branch) which separates much of Washington DC’s southeast wards from the rest of the city.
Martha Jackson-Jarvis: Overall Artist’s Statement
My art practice encompasses sculpture, public art, and studio production that include two-dimensional works. The unifying elements and indelible relationship between each genre are my continuous investigation of scale, intrinsic material structure, and imagined form. The elastic boundaries of my studio practice fuel the production and sustainability of works that move freely between permanence and impermanence. I consider each work an intricate part of one unified body of work and continuous narrative. I create imagined space and form that signify action, ritual, repetition, and innovation. My works are attentive to ecosystems, decay, rebirth, sedimentation, and transformative form.
Artist’s Statement on this work
River Spirits of the Anacostia depicts the topographical meandering course of the Anacostia River. It reveals the beauty and magnetism of the river that has served the community as a central focus and ecological jewel for centuries. Before its decline into pollution and advancing sediment, the Anacostia River teamed with varieties of fish, plants, and wildlife.
River Spirits of the Anacostia pays homage to the resilient and forceful nature of the river to regenerate itself and marks our ongoing struggle to live in harmony with the treasures of our natural resources.
Topographic mapping of the river's course unifies all four walls depicting the fervor and energy of the Anacostia.
The east wall pays homage to the Nacotchtanke as keepers of the river. In ancient Native American lore, the tortoise is believed to support the earth and all its systems on its back. The tortoise serves as spirit guide along the Anacostia, on its back is an iron cosmogram of the four moments of the sun to mark the place where enslaved Africans were brought into port at Bladensburg along the Anacostia.
The mosaic charts the return of the River Spirits to the Anacostia as a boy and a great blue heron fish the river. A stylized image of a Native American "Wampum" which is a purple and white beaded strip that symbolizes an historical event of the people, and was used in trade. Here the wampum symbolizes trade and the power to live, prosper and make a living without destroying the resources of the river.
The north wall depicts native aquatic plants and captures the flight of the white egret. The west and south walls champion the symbolic return of healthy living resources of the river. The Anacostia of the past flourished with an abundance of fishes such as American and hickory shad, white and yellow perch, pumpkinseed sunfish, catfish, herring, alewife, darters, and striped bass. These species of fish are added to the mosaic as emblematic symbols of survival and hope for the future of the river. The return of fish and native aquatic plants to the Anacostia renews our faith and ability to impact the river positively with respect, care, and diligence to protect its natural resources. On the west wall floats a single osprey feather and illuminated water lilies.
River Spirits of the Anacostia champions the community people of Anacostia who love and advocate the survival of the Anacostia River as one of the nation's great treasures and natural resources.
Background
The work was commissioned by the Washington Transit Authority in 2003.
Martha Jackson-Jarvis (American, b. 1952). From the Public Art Archive: “Martha Jackson Jarvis grew up in Lynchburg, Virginia and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and currently lives and works in Washington, D.C. She has studied mosaic techniques and stone cutting in Ravenna, Italy. Ms. Jarvis' sculptures have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the United States and abroad.”
For background on the Kongo cosmogram, see
For background on the tortoise or turtle imagery in Native American spirituality, including the Lenape and Haudenosaunee (“Iroquois”), see
Also see
For background on wampum, see
Interpretive Notes
The entire 400-foot long work may be understood as a kind of painted prayer, expressing the aspiration that through careful stewardship, the Anacostia River may be restored to its full ecological vigor — and the ancient spirits of the riverscape, associated with Native American and African ancestral spirituality— may once be activated in a river that has long been polluted with agricultural runoff, industrial effluent, human waste, and garbage.
Alternatively, the entire 400-foot stretch can be interpreted as a transformation of a band or string of wampum, an ancient medium of exchange, incorporating strands of shell beads, that bound together Native Eastern Woodland communities. Wampum allowed people to transform their connections to one another through evocations of important events and experiences in the shared history of the peoples as they entered into life-giving exchange relationships.
Like wampum itself, this work plays with time in interesting ways, evoking both linear and cyclical understandings of time and history. The work’s 52 panels may evoke the 52 weeks of the year, encompassing the annual round. The piece might be read in a counter clockwise direction, starting with the image over the station’s eastern entrance of the tortoise, ancient sign of Native American spirituality over which has been superimposed the Kongo cosmogram, an ancient West-Central African motif of the cyclical journey of life through “the four moments of the sun”, from birth, through adulthood, to death to ancestorhood and rebirth into new, regenerated life. The work continues around the enveloping walls with visions of the river across time, as if viewed from space, starting with a stretch of the river on which are superimposed ancient spiral petroglyphs, evocative of rock art associated with the Lenape and other indigenous people of this region. Other sections highlight the floral and faunal richness of the river system, which has ebbed and flowed across time. The circle, in a sense, culminates immediately to the left of the foundational tortoise-cosmogram, in which we see visions, perhaps at a new dawn, of the river’s restoration: a boy fishing and a great blue heron returning to its ancient feeding grounds.
As with Allardyce-Tully’s Connections sculpture, the work refutes the old adage in DC, “when you cross the river, the door closes,” that stressed the limited material opportunities offered to those who reside east of the Anacostia. Rather, in these works the river is celebrated as a source of spiritual and ecological blessings that continues to open portals to new possibilities and ways of being in the world.
Prompts for Close Looking
How many different aquatic plant and river animal species can you identify along the 400 feet of the mosaic? You might try to use an app like “iNaturalist” to help.
Compare the different sections of the mural with maps of the Chesapeake Bay system and the Anacostia (Eastern Branch) river: can you match particular sections of the river with specific panels of the artwork?
n what ways does the whole encircling stretch of the mosaic remind you of a belt of wampum? Look up different examples of wampum belts or strings: what similarities to the long band of the artwork can be observed as it wraps around the whole station?
Look closely at all the different petroglyph-inspired spirals: how do they relate to the twisting energies of the river as it meanders through the landscape?
Compare the great red tortoise (with the Kongo cosmogram) over it, above the eastern entrance to the station, the great green tortoise, above the western entrance, the blue tortoise on the northern wall, and the red tortoise (without the Kongo cosmogram) on the southern walls. How are they alike and different, and what visual role do they play in relation to the surrounding visual elements? Some Native American people characterize the North American continent as “Turtle Island”. Is there a way in which we can see our entire shared experience of life and the world on the backs of these four tortoises?
How might the artist be relating ancient experiences of traveling along the river, by canoe or other vessels, to our modern experience of traveling through the DC area on the Metro rail system? Do the tortoises still guide us along our journeys, along Metrorail, as they once did along the river?
Gabrielle Tayac, a Piscataway indigenous scholar and curator, has characterized the relationship between Native Americans and African Americans in the Tidewater region as “indivisible.” What traces can you discern in this work of profound links between “Red” and “Black” or Native and African, spiritual and cultural traditions?
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