Mama Wata

Radcliffe Bailey took up the figure of Mami Wata—a general name for numerous mermaid goddesses popu-larized in the 19th century by Black peoples around the Atlantic Ocean—as part of a long-lived fascination with water and its powers of transformation. Bailey’s technique of collaging old photographs, cryptic letters, and allusive decorations, often with backgrounds of indigo or green, here suggests shape-shifting as a human and aesthetic ideal. In Sabine Jell-Bahlsen’s 1991 video Mammy Water, which Bailey admired, a narrator explains: “Many Mammy Water followers are prophets or mediums of the water spirits. As performing artists, they express new ideas and forms.”