Seaway to the Future

Taking its title from Alexander Missal’s 2009 cultural history of the Panama Canal Zone, Seaway to the Future examines the history of interoceanic projects in the Americas and how the Panama Canal has been imagined, represented, and contested across more than a century. Curated by Magalí Arriola, the exhibition includes archival documents, films, and ephemera that enter into dialogue with contemporary and newly commissioned works by contemporary artists. It revisits key episodes in its history through the images and narratives that shaped public understandings of this transformative interoceanic project.

Departing from the broader geopolitical dynamics of nineteenth-century imperial ambitions—particularly the implementation of the Monroe Doctrine and the ideology of Manifest Destiny as forces that came into conflict with France’s imperial ambitions in the Americas, precipitated by the American Civil War—this project reveals how these competing expansionist visions ultimately laid the groundwork for the construction of the Canal under North-American control.

Coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the Torrijos–Carter Treaties, which initiated the transfer of the waterway from United States control to Panama, the exhibition traces the shifting geopolitical ambitions, cultural encounters, and media histories that have converged around the Canal. Bringing historical materials into dialogue with contemporary artistic practices, Seaway to the Future explores the point at which events cease to belong to the present and be come history, and conversely, the conditions under which history reasserts itself as an urgent contemporaneity.

Seaway to the Future will be presented at Americas Society September 8 through December 11, 2027.