For Cornelius Tulloch’s solo presentation at The Armory, the artist traces the history of Marronage in connection to the South Florida Everglades and the Saltwater Railroad: a route to liberation that cut through Florida’s west coast and out across Biscayne Bay, carrying freedom seekers to maroon communities in the Caribbean. In South Florida, Marronage calls to mind Seminole communities, freedmen, and Black and Afro-Indigenous peoples who sought refuge in the state’s natural landscapes—building self-sustaining societies within the wild. 

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This body of work carries the movement and spirit of masquerade traditions such as Junkanoo, along with other African practices that have traveled through these landscapes, bridging the Caribbean and the U.S. South. It speaks to movement, migration, history, and deep rootedness in place. Dance is explored between landscapes and cultures, creating a borderland where identity is always in motion, always in flux. The figures merge with the environment, becoming a humanoid form intertwined with the flora and terrain of these territories.

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In Tulloch’s Glades Guardian diptych, the figure serves as a self-portrait of the artist as well as a stand-in for the Maroon figure: a vessel for memory, presence and reclamation. Our protagonist works to restore imagery missing from personal and collective histories, filling the gaps left by erasure. These connections, rooted in oral traditions, research, and lived experience, are carried forward here in visual form. These works reinscribe the landscape with its own guardianship. 

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In Eclipse, the green-scarred figure reappears, this time in the shadowed palette of an eclipse. The astronomical event of the eclipse is more than background: it shapes the tides, stirs the instincts of animals, and alters the rhythms of the natural world. In this piece, its pull mirrors the figure’s own alignment with the landscape, where cycles of light and darkness reveal novel ways of seeing. Woven into this moment is the presence of the bushman from Jamaican culture, someone who may seem untethered from society, yet is bound closely to the land, moving with its cues and reading its signs. In this space, solitude is a deeper form of belonging, and a state in which the figure is both apart from and a part of the eclipsing world around him. At the center, a void holds the gaze, an opening where eclipse light, landscape, and self meet, and where stillness itself becomes a kind of movement. 

 

Garifuna honors the presence of Maroon societies and their histories across the Americas, depicting Kaysy Gotay and her lineage of Garifuna. The Garifuna trace their Afro-Indigenous ancestry to St. Vincent, where a Maroon community was later exiled to Central America. It is a story of place-making, of home as something continually remade. As these identities traversed new landscapes, their culture adapted, absorbing and enriching itself through each new space. Upright in her power, strength, and poise, the subject meets the viewer’s gaze directly. The surrounding flora carries the symbolism of plants significant to the Garifuna people, while the palette reflects the vivid greens and reds of the quetzal, Guatemala’s national bird. Rooted in deep research and personal interviews, this intimate portrayal embodies both the subject’s lineage and the living legacy of one of many enduring Maroon heritages today.