TERRY BODDIE
Blueprints
By Christopher Cozier
AT A PRESENTATION by the British artist Keith Piper in Chicago in the mid 2000s , his encounter with Bob Marley ’ s Survival album cover ( designed by Neville Garrick in 1979 ), and its impact and influence came up . This took me back to when I bought the same album in Port of Spain in 1979 .
I knew the Brookes slave ship illustration of the late 18th century abolitionist posters from my Caribbean history schoolbooks . Seeing it placed next to the flags of African nations transformed and shifted it into a pop culture vocabulary of the moment .
Looking at Terry Boddie ’ s image , Prison Industrial I , I could not help but wonder if he ’ d had the same encounter . But in 1979 , he was younger and being both transported and transplanted to the United States by his mother , which is another related story . He came across the album cover a few years later in college . Boddie ’ s fluid placement of the prison bars , the transactional bar code , and the iconic slave ship illustration bring the social systems of the alleged past into dialogue with our present — the criminal enterprise of trading in captured , incarcerated , and transported Black bodies .
The artist also talks about the influence of the blues . I thought of that blue , the color from the flags of all those empires .
Prison Industrial I instigates an awareness , through a vocabulary we all now share in our respective “ Atlantic ” locations .
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