Methane Sea

A welded steel structure draped with tangled ropes wedged with fids (conical wooden tools used on boats to secure lines and sails), Methane Sea was featured in the last exhibition of Adkins’s work organized during his lifetime, Nenuphar, which explored obscure affinities between the African-American scientist and inventor George Washington Carver (1864–1943) and the French artist Yves Klein (1928–1962). Adkins explained that Methane Sea “ had to do with [their] different relationships to the sea and to ships.” Carver was born a slave and Klein was from the maritime city of Nice. Adkins continued, “Both of them... dealt in abstract worlds... and both of them dealt with microscopic and macroscopic things.”

Credit: Gift of Agnes Gund