Why Exploration?

When I was fifteen years old, I spent my summers working as a deckhand aboard the Guanahani, a fishing vessel operated by the Bahamian government. Every year, the boat employed summer students, and for nearly two and a half months we lived almost entirely at sea, fishing for deep-water species such as red snapper.

The name Guanahani has its own history. It was the Lucayan name for the island now known as San Salvador, where Christopher Columbus first encountered the Indigenous people of the Bahamas in 1492. Even before I understood the significance of that history, I sensed that the boat carried more than fishermen. It carried stories.

For the first time in my life, I left the island in a material way.

The horizon stopped feeling like an edge and became an invitation.

Life at sea changes your sense of scale. With no city lights, the night sky revealed itself in astonishing detail. The stars stretched endlessly overhead while the ocean below shimmered with bioluminescent phytoplankton, transforming the wake of the boat into liquid constellations.

Jellyfish drifted beneath the surface like floating lanterns. At times, miles of dolphins seemed to rise from the water at once, leaping through the waves as though the sea itself had come alive.

Not every memory was beautiful.

On one occasion, I had to bail water from a small dinghy alongside the main vessel as it began filling with seawater. It was a reminder that exploration requires responsibility as much as wonder.

Looking back, I realize those summers taught me something I have carried ever since.

Exploration is not about conquering a place.

It is about entering into a relationship with it.

As I grew older, I began to see the Bahamas differently. What had once seemed like a chain of isolated islands revealed itself as an important crossroads of the Atlantic world.

For centuries, these islands have been shaped by Indigenous communities, European empires, pirates, merchants, migrants, smugglers, and travelers moving between continents. The Bahamas has always been connected to the wider world, even when people have imagined it as remote.

Perhaps that is why I never believed exploration belonged only to distant places.

It was already embedded in the place I called home.

Years later, my own journeys were often inspired not simply by destinations, but by stories.

My dear friend, the late writer and cultural critic Greg Tate, gave me a book by Vladimir Nabokov that carried with it the idea of distant landscapes and dreams of ice. That gift stayed with me. It became one of the sparks that eventually led me toward the Arctic.

Another guide was Matthew Henson, the Black American explorer whose extraordinary contributions to polar exploration were overlooked for much of history. His life reminded me that exploration is never only about discovering new places. It is also about recovering forgotten stories and expanding our understanding of who history chooses to remember.

In 2013, I traveled to the North Pole, surrounded by an expanse of ice that felt ancient, immense, and almost beyond imagination.

The journey was not separate from my work as an artist. It grew directly from it.

My curiosity had already carried me toward space.

In 2008, I traveled to the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center outside Moscow, where I trained alongside astronauts and immersed myself in the physical and psychological culture of spaceflight.

I was not there because I expected to become an astronaut. I was there because I wanted to understand exploration at one of its furthest edges.

At the center of that journey was the story of Robert Henry Lawrence Jr., the first African American selected for any national space program. Although he died before having the opportunity to travel into space, his life transformed my understanding of who exploration belongs to and whose stories are allowed to remain visible.

His story eventually became central to ENOCH, a project created in his memory and launched into space in 2018.

People often ask why an artist would seek out these experiences.

The answer is simple.

Exploration changes the questions you ask.

It expands your sense of what is possible. It teaches humility. It reminds you that every map is incomplete, every history contains absences, and every horizon invites another journey.

For me, exploration has never been separate from art.

They are the same practice.

Both begin with curiosity. Both require imagination. Both ask us to move beyond what is familiar in search of new ways of seeing.

When I think back to those summers aboard the Guanahani, I realize I was not simply learning how to fish.

I was learning how to follow an idea wherever it might lead.

I have been following that horizon ever since.

Exploration begins long before the journey. It begins with curiosity.