Essex Boston & Family 1

Michelle Elzay’s careful arrangements of cups, pipes, and shoes recall an archaeologist’s reunification and examination of ancient discoveries. Many of the items presented here were recovered starting in 2015 through salvage archaeology at a nineteenth-century trash pit on a property that once belonged to Essex Boston (1741–1827), in Nantucket, Massachusetts.

Born enslaved, Boston became a businessperson and property owner after his manumission at age eighteen. Despite the family’s contemporaneous influence, Boston’s history was largely forgotten. In Elzay’s work, the objects once touched, used, and then discarded, are sometimes paired with contemporary ones, such as the beef shank, at top center, which has been set beside a shank bone found at the pit. Together, the historical objects and those that reflect Elzay’s extensive research hint at the Boston family’s and its community’s customs, likes, and socioeconomic roles.

Michelle Elzay (born 1973, Long Island, New York) Currently resides in New York, New York, and Nantucket, Massachusetts
Dye transfer prints, 2019–20 Collection of the artist