Madeline Blair (aka Adelaide Andrews, aka “Jackie”) was a stowaway on the Battleship Arizona in 1924 who managed to avoid being found for five weeks as the ship sailed from the Hudson River to Panama. Conflicting reports from newspaper stories, tabloid features, and court documents describe her as a prostitute, as a spirited flapper with the moxie and wit to stow away on a Navy battleship, or as a co-conspirator with the sailors who helped to hide and feed her.
Even though they are referred to repeatedly and catalogued as evidence, photographs of Madeline are missing from the sailors’ court martial files in the National Archives. In response to this absence, we created a speculative archive of over 200 vintage photographs, 127 cataloged newspaper articles, and various ephemera, found and sourced through online archives, catalogs, auctions, and collections. Designed, re-imagined, or adapted historical objects act as narrative devices for the stories that surround Madeline’s journey.
TIDES utilizes text from Madeline’s “first person” account of her adventures on the Arizona and images from our archive. These elements are controlled by real time data (wind, tide, and currents) from Madeline’s point of origin near the Hudson River in New York. With lower tides, additional images are revealed between the text columns, like life in a tidepool. Current data points change the level of distortion of the text, and wind data controls the speed at which the text moves. Scrolling up or down gives access to additional changes, and new juxtapositions. The absurdity of a single voice or narrative is amplified, along with the necessity of fiction, skepticism, and play in the landscape of history.
Stories like Madeline’s that exist along the margins of official narratives are often complicated by rumors, sensational reporting, and contradictory voices. These elements, often antithetical to the objectives of a history museum, require experimental forms to convey their precarious, yet insistent, relationship to history and the complexity of human experience.
NEWS CLIPPINGS brings together clippings from newspaper accounts of Madeline’s story, pointing to contradictory details and imagined storylines as the news spread of her incredible journey. Users are encouraged to arrange the clippings to reveal different perspectives and narratives and compare details. Madeline’s complex story illustrates the subversive power of being undefined, operating between the lines, dodging descriptions by others and reveling in the mysteries among the material traces of history.
A Further Sea is a project by Anastasiia Raina and Rebecca Sittler.
