Andrea Motley Crabtree, the first
Henry Taylor American
This portrait is based on a 1982 photograph of Andrea Motley Crabtree, the first woman and the first Black woman to serve as a deep-sea diver in the U.S. Army. Wearing a massive diving suit and helmet, Crabtree sits as if enthroned, according regal status to her feats of exploration. Transit over and through seawater also evokes a broader historical narrative that began with the transatlantic slave trade across the liminal space of the ocean. In recognition of the Atlantic seabed as a place of cultural significance, teams of Black scuba divers work today to locate and record historical information about sunken slave ships and to place memorials acknowledging the victims of slavery.
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