{"id":136064,"date":"2026-02-17T12:49:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-17T12:49:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/136064\/"},"modified":"2026-02-17T12:49:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-17T12:49:08","slug":"introducing-new-contemporary-art-at-the-queens-house-for-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/136064\/","title":{"rendered":"Introducing new contemporary art at the Queen’s House for 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mapping narratives: ‘The Rhumblineage of Penelope Steel’ by Remiiya Badru<\/p>\n

During her Lloyd\u2019s Register Foundation Creative Research Fellowship (2024-25), Remiiya Badru <\/a>encountered the little-known mapmaker Penelope Steel (c.1768 – 1840). Born in Jamaica to a free Black woman and a white slave owner and merchant, Steel later migrated to the City of London, where she ran a chart and nautical book-publishing business on Union Row, Little Tower Hill, with her husband, David Steel. Following his death in 1803, she took over the business, known for Steel’s Navy List.<\/p>\n

Commissioned to create an artwork on Steel\u2019s life for a display in the Queen\u2019s House, Badru worked to reconstruct the gaps in the fragmentary and incomplete archive, by reimagining Steel’s life, relationships and spiritual ancestry.<\/p>\n

\"Artist<\/p>\n

Artist Remiiya Badru next to The Rhumblineage of Penelope Steel on display in the Queen’s House<\/p>\n

She retraced the sites in London that Steel would have inhabited, to explore what it might have meant for Steel to navigate race, gender and commerce in the City at the turn of the nineteenth century. This included questioning whether Steel\u2019s mixed heritage meant she was \u201cpassable\u201d as white, and how this impacted her inheritance, status, agency and wealth.<\/p>\n

In The Rhumblineage of Penelope Steel<\/a>, Badru weaves together Steel\u2019s personal archival traces against broader geopolitical contexts of trade and empire through the concept of \u2018rhumblineage\u2019. Drawing on rhumblines \u2013 navigational tools used to plot a ship\u2019s course on a chart \u2013 Badru uses materials including wool, fragments of found rope, and other textiles to craft a map of both tangible and intangible connections across Steel\u2019s life.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Ropes and shells are just some of the materials used in Remiiya Badru’s The Rhumblineage of Penelope Steel<\/p>\n

Her practice recalls the image of flying fish as seamstresses in Grace Nichols\u2019 2006 poetry collection Startling the Flying Fish. \u00a0Nichols creates a mythical figure of the Cariwoma \u2013 a hybrid of Caribbean and woman \u2013 who \u201cwatched history happen\u201d and whose all-seeing gaze ebbs and flows, like the rhythms of the sea. She moves between the violence of enslavement and the diasporic present, where her children, “sucked abroad”, have “stamped themselves \/ with the ink of exile”. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Like the Cariwoma, Badru imbues her work with mythic and spiritual dimensions of African diaspora womanhood, incorporating the flying fish and other symbols in The Rhumblineage of Penelope Steel. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Detail<\/p>\n

Details of flying fish and the Sankofa bird within the artwork<\/p>\n

Badru recalls \u201cthe pure joy of witnessing the magic of flying fish whilst sailing from Carriacou to Grenada. They were like \u2018taliswomen\u2019 leaping out of the water \u2013 momentarily journeying in between worlds… pure magic. Freedom. To me, the oceans embody multilayered and multisensory mythic narratives connecting many realms of rhumblines, which are timeless and boundless.\u201d<\/p>\n

Badru\u2019s work, like Nichols\u2019 Cariwoma, declares:<\/p>\n

I sing of Sea self\u00a0
a glittering breathing\u00a0
in a turquoise dress\u00a0
Constantly stitched and restitched\u00a0
by the bright seamstresses of flying-fish.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mapping narratives: ‘The Rhumblineage of Penelope Steel’ by Remiiya Badru During her Lloyd\u2019s Register Foundation Creative Research Fellowship…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":136065,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[9,24,63,122,124,123],"class_list":{"0":"post-136064","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-queens","8":"tag-new-york","9":"tag-new-york-city","10":"tag-nyc","11":"tag-queens","12":"tag-queens-headlines","13":"tag-queens-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136064"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136064\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/136065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}