Cumberland Island (Sea Camp)

A photograph of a tent with images from Cumberland Island National Seashore. The tent is photographed on Cumberland Island, in this image.

This collaboration with Meredith Laura Lynn was installed as a part of the Atlanta Biennial exhibition "Of Care and Destruction" curated by Jordan Amirkhani. She wrote the following about our project:

Tennessee-based artist Katie Hargrave and Florida-based artist Meredith Lynn work collaboratively to explore the historical, cultural, and environmental impacts of public lands and to grapple with the far-reaching implications of American mythologies of open space, frontiers, and freedom. For this project, Hargrave and Lynn traveled to Cumberland Island on the coast of Georgia—the state’s largest and southernmost barrier island, and home to 9,800 acres of Congressionally-designated “wilderness”—to experience and seek to understand this site as tourists and artists. Originally settled and cultivated by the Mocuma peoples over 4,000 years ago, European colonists from Spain, France, and England systematically destroyed the various Native communities struggling to remain on Cumberland Island across the 16th to 19th centuries, eventually transforming the island into a network of cash crop plantations dependent on slave labor. Purchased by the wealthy industrial capitalist Thomas M. Carnegie in 1880, Cumberland Island was eventually sold to the National park Foundation in 1972 after much in-fighting between Carnegie family members, real estate developers, environmental activists, and the local community. Hargrave and Lynn’s tent, printed with open access images of Cumberland Island’s campground, stands as a modest monument to those who have claimed these lands across the generations and asks questions about what and who “public” land is for.