Van Cortlandt House Museum exhibit reexamines the estate’s ties to slavery

For more than a century, the Van Cortlandt House Museum has offered a glimpse into the lives of one of New York’s wealthiest colonial families. Now, an exhibition is peeling back the curtain on the estate’s history, examining its enduring ties to the transatlantic slave trade through a contemporary artistic lens.

Located in Van Cortlandt Park, the museum’s first sitewide exhibition, “Overlapping Empires,” reimagines the 1748 home and the land it sits on — once a plantation — as shaped by Dutch, British and American imperial rule and the Munsee Lenape people, as well as the generations of enslaved African, Caribbean and descended people whose labor made the Van Cortlandt family’s wealth possible.

Jamaican-born Bronx artist and photographer Samantha Box takes visitors on an immersive journey, encouraging them to view the estate from a new perspetive that challenges long-held notions. Her large-scale photographs on transparent panels take over each room, overlaying collages of broken masonry, construction debris and brightly colored Caribbean souvenir packaging onto the home’s meticulously preserved interiors.

Throughout the home, washes of magenta light and a subtle soundscape lead visitors to the former enslaved quarters on the third floor, where the light appears to emanate from the attic space once occupied by enslaved people.

A common theme throughout, Box said, traces the estate’s commercial ties to the Caribbean, where food produced on the Van Cortlandt plantation helped sustain enslaved people on sugar plantations, creating a profitable trade network that enriched the family.

Box said the exhibition challenges visitors to think beyond the familiar Revolutionary War narrative and instead recognize the estate as part of a much larger system of empire and commerce.

The exhibition grew from nearly a year of collaboration between Box and museum staff after the project received funding through the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts.

Box, who lives across from Van Cortlandt Park, said she had visited the park countless times but had rarely entered the museum before being invited to create the exhibition. Her research led her through every room in the house and deep into the history of both the Van Cortlandt family and the storied past of the land they owned, but one realization quickly emerged.

“This space is very much connected to the Caribbean because many enslaved people who first built this house, who were working these agricultural fields that are now the playing fields, who dammed the creek, built the mill house and ground the wheat into flour, connect this place to it,” she said.

Born in Jamaica, the photographer said much of her artistic practice begins with her own experience in the Caribbean diaspora, examining how histories of empire, migration and enslavement continue to shape the present. Discovering that those same histories were embedded in a museum she had passed countless times transformed the commission into something much more intimate.

The Van Cortlandt family’s wealth grew through the Dutch West India Company, with generations exporting flour, wheat, butter and other products from the estate, but largely from trafficking enslaved laborers between Caribbean colonies and New York.

“We think about the Caribbean as this sort of zone of paradise, but the way it’s often been positioned disguises the continued exploitation of people who have histories of transport as enslavement or indenture,” Box said. “Our notions of a place hide the mechanisms that continue the empire, just like this house.”

Rather than adding artwork to the museum, Box sought to “interrupt it.” That idea crystallized as Box learned more about the history of historic house museums themselves.

The Van Cortlandt House became New York City’s first historic house museum in 1897, the third oldest in the nation. Its rooms were restored and furnished to be historically accurate; however, only a small portion of the furnishings actually belonged to the Van Cortlandt family.

Van Cortlandt House Museum Director Margaret Holmes said Box’s willingness to question traditional interpretation is exactly what drew the museum to the project. The museum’s status as New York City’s first historic house museum makes that evolution especially meaningful, she said.

“I think it shows what historic preservation can do and the capacity that it has to tell these stories and integrate art and these different media into our interpretations,” Holmes said.

Many of Box’s photographs draw inspiration from Dutch still-life paintings, a genre she argues celebrates the wealth of empires while obscuring the exploitation that produced it.

“Dutch still-life paintings are basically advertisements for the Dutch Empire,” she said. “Under these sumptuous presentations of beauty, the products and objects are pulled from all parts of the empire. It becomes this presentation of luxury that says you should align yourself with the empire.”

The exhibition also confronts Revolutionary War mythology. One installation in the room George Washington once stayed in references his postwar request that the British return enslaved people who escaped after being promised freedom in exchange for fighting against the Americans. There, a transparent photographic overlay of the president’s dentures — made in part from the teeth of enslaved people — is hung before a table and chair draped with a Revolutionary War military coat.  Visitors must look through the image to view the room beyond.

“I was like, ‘Here is a crack in this notion of America and American freedom,’” Box said. “To encounter George Washington’s figure, we should have to see him through this perspective.”

Rather than offering visitors definitive answers, “Overlapping Empires” asks them to question what they see, Box said. As they move through the house, familiar rooms become spaces where competing ideas of freedom and memory overlap.