Kea Tawana: I Traveled into the Future in a Dream

Kea Tawana: I Traveled into the Future in a Dream debuts the John Michael Kohler Arts Center’s recent acquisition of the contents from the artist’s small apartment in Port Jervis, New York. The exhibition runs through October 8 at the Arts Center, located in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.

Kea Tawana: I Traveled into the Future in a Dream is the first museum show of Tawana’s work, and the first exhibition of her work outside of the northeastern United States. It recontextualizes her work and life in several ways, including her long-running and largely unknown roles as architect, community activist, historian, educator, and craftsperson. Many of the objects, which were gifted to the Arts Center by Gallery Aferro and Kohler Foundation, Inc., are on view for the first time.

Tawana (c. 1935–2016) is known for the Ark, an eighty-six-foot-long, three-story ship she created in Newark, New Jersey, starting in 1982. For decades prior, she had salvaged wood, glass shards, and other materials from abandoned buildings in the city’s Central Ward. Incorporating those materials, she built her future home, which she hoped to christen AKE Matsu Kaisha (Red Pine), on an empty lot.

The Ark was still unfinished when the city condemned it in 1987. Unable to find a new location, Tawana dismantled her ship in 1988. The Ark’s destruction haunted her, and she began to imagine a life on land that was free from greed, racism, poverty, and injustice.

Included in the exhibition are about thirty handmade boxes containing collaged and tied “encyclopedic files” and personal effects; Tawana’s blueprints for utopic, unrealized building projects; handmade stained-glass windows; and hundreds of sketches and manuscripts.

Little concrete biographical information is known about Tawana. However, her limited possessions—sorted and packed into handmade trunks—convey a commitment to learning, self-reliance, shared responsibility, and the search for freedom.

Tawana’s collection of books and assembled encyclopedias speaks to a person with a curious mind who was constantly seeking new information and eager to know. Her ingenuity is evidenced in her handmade tools, antennas, and creative reuse. Her reverence for beauty is shown in the many stained-glass windows she made.

“Though informative, beginning to unpack Tawana’s possessions has left more questions than answers,” said Laura Bickford, curator of the exhibition. ”Most of them will likely never be answered, and perhaps they shouldn’t be. And those questions are full of potential. They allow us to follow Tawana’s lead—to learn, to make, to connect, to strive.”

Throughout the run of this exhibition, JMKAC staff will be in the gallery photographing and documenting the objects

Admission to the John Michael Kohler Arts Center is free. For more information about Kea Tawana: I Traveled into the Future in a Dream and other Arts Center exhibitions and programs, visit jmkac.org.

Kea Tawana: I Traveled into the Future in a Dream is supported by the Kohler Trust for Arts and Education, the Frederic Cornell Kohler Charitable Trust, Kohler Foundation, Inc., and the Wisconsin Arts Board with funds from the State of Wisconsin and the National Endowment for the Arts.