Gulf Stream, 2022

Atlantic Cedar & White Oak wood, brass hardware 

Connecting to global histories of diaspora, trade, migration, and labor. 

Nationally acclaimed artist Hugh Hayden is known for transforming wood into surreal installations, using the medium’s multi-layered histories to explore the complexities of the human condition, American history, and the systems embedded within our society and culture. Gulf Stream, a hybrid clinker-built boat sculpture with a carved skeletal interior, brings Hayden’s investigations into the heart of revolutionary Boston here at the Charlestown Navy Yard. This artwork was first exhibited in New York City’s Brooklyn Bridge Park as part of Public Art Fund’s 2022 exhibition “Black Atlantic,” inspired by the transatlantic networks of the past that make up the diverse identities and cultures of present-day African diaspora. 

Gulf Stream symbolically alludes to the lives lost at sea during the Middle Passage, the forced trafficking of enslaved Africans to North America during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. As a major port city during the colonial era, Boston played a key role in this story, with the first slave trade voyage from the American colonies also sailing out of Massachussets. Here at the Navy Yard, the nearby USS Constitution is known to contain live oak timbers dangerously harvested by enslaved labor on the coastal islands of Georgia. By recontextualizing Gulf Stream at Dry Dock 2, Hayden’s work brings to light the presence of Black stories often overlooked in the telling of Boston’s colonial history and American heritage.

This artwork is further connected to our city through its namesake, an 1899 painting by Boston-born landscape artist Winslow Homer. The original scene shows a lone Black man in a broken down boat struggling against the sea while surrounded by sharks, with stalks of sugarcane on deck. A 2003 interpretation of the same name by leading contemporary artist Kerry James Marshall reimagined the scene with a Black family sailing leisurely while a storm looms on the horizon. Over a century, all three versions of Gulf Stream have referenced the precarity Black Americans experience in the United States. Presented here, Gulf Stream connects New England histories to global histories of African diaspora, trade, migration, and labor.