On a small pedestrian oasis on 14th Street between Hudson Street and Ninth Avenue stands “The Mothership Connection,” an artwork that appears to be a funky rocket ship that’s landed in New York after roaming the African-diasporic cultural universe.
Downtown Manhattan was not a stop on its original itinerary. Its maker, Zak Ové, a 59-year-old British-Trinidadian artist who grew up in London, was commissioned in 2019 to make a work that spoke about the African diaspora for a sculpture park in Hawaii. To design it he leaned into his fascination with the mythologies of traditional masks from African antiquity and his childhood memory of seeing Parliament-Funkadelic in concert; the sculpture is named after the band’s 1975 album.
The 30-foot-tall sculpture seems simultaneously a rocket and a monumental totem for some undiscovered tribe. It has several tiers, including red and green legs angling over the bottom section, where a yellow cylinder decorated with vertical magenta bars surround undulant red flames in Perspex.
The next tiers above are varicolored squares with blue and magenta posts poking outward and above glassy mask forms and incised Haitian Vodou symbols. Above this is a multicolored body of appliquéd lights designed for vintage Cadillac cars and decorative flanges that project outward like wings. The top of the piece is a blue mask of West African origin, topped with and surrounded by a translucent red headdress.
In an interview, Ové described the work as “a mash-up.” He noted specific elements including a Mende helmet mask worn by women in healing ceremonies in Sierra Leone, the Luba masks from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kwele masks and Vodou veve’s symbology from Haiti and from Trinidad. Not long before making the piece, he had visited Washington, D.C., he said, where he was “fascinated by Masonic architecture, so I’ve referenced things like Masonic pillars.”
Ové’s “The Mothership Connection” likely also has roots in the artist’s own upbringing and artistic life.
His father, who died in 2023, was Sir Horace Ové, a Trinidadian-born filmmaker, photographer, painter and writer who became the first Black British filmmaker to direct a feature-length film, “Pressure,” from 1975. The younger Ové also worked in a film genre, making music videos in the late 1980s. That brought him from London to New York City, where he lived from 1989 to 1996 and made videos for musical artists including Monie Love, Patra and P.M. Dawn, among many others. He also traveled to Jamaica to direct the music video for “Murder She Wrote” for the reggae musicians Chaka Demus & Pliers.
But it was his excursions to Trinidad to document Carnival celebrations that were “an epiphany,” he said. “I became fascinated with how Carnival was being used as a tool of radical politics and revolution, how masquerade had become a space for pivotally working towards Trinidad’s independence.”
The magpie colors of “The Mothership Connection” nod toward that yearly festival. Ové called the use of color “a sense of celebration.”
He added: “What I discovered with Carnival was that one could proclaim victory through celebration.”
The Hawaiian municipality that commissioned the piece decided against opening the sculpture park because of the coronavirus pandemic. “The Mothership Connection” languished unfinished for three years in storage until Ové had it fabricated. (It is made of welded stainless steel with a head made from transparent sheathing fiberglass and masks that are cast acrylic resin.) It was first shown at the Frieze Art Fair in 2023.
There, he met the curator Allison Glenn. She found the money to bring it to Detroit, he said, specifically to the Shepherd, a renovated historic church run by the Library Street Collective, which hosts exhibitions.
Lisa Altshuler, who runs the nonprofit NALA Projects, took notice, met Ové, and was so excited by the work that she wanted to bring it to New York. She secured funds through her work with the Meatpacking District Management Association.
“We wanted to showcase the Mothership in a high-trafficked/high-visibility setting where the histories and heritages embedded in the work could be illuminated,” Altshuler wrote in an email. The Meatpacking District, she added, was an ideal environment with thousands of visitors per day of many generations and ethnicities. “The ‘Mothership,” she said, “has become the cool kid on the block.”
Of the references to Parliament-Funkadelic, Ové said he was “always a big fan of the kind of futuristic emancipation that they projected in their music, their style.” He was starved for it in Britain in the early ’70s, when, he said: “We had such small moments of Black culture in the mainstream. We had one hour of reggae music, probably two hours of soul music a week you could pick up on. We had never seen anything like that before.”
The sculpture is scheduled to be on display through Nov. 21. If you visit it at night, you will see it lit from within, a glow that helps make the past meaningful in the now. “When you’re looking at a Mende helmet mask that for years sat in a cobwebbed box in the British Museum,” he said, “it’s nice to see it in its full radiance, breathing to its audience.”
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