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.
18