Our Colonial Inheritance

Gardner's work is part of a large-scale semi-permanent exhibition titled Our Colonial Inheritance recently installed at Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. As stated on the museum's website "Colonialism is not a thing of the past. It has shaped the world: our physical, mental and personal world. Colonialism lives on to this day. In the exhibition [...] we look at the Dutch colonial history and presence, in Indonesia, Suriname, Curaçao, Saint Maarten and many other countries [...]. The exhibition shows how colonialism shaped the world of today, and how people endured colonialism."

Gardner's full suite of thirteen lithographs titled Creole Portraits III was acquired by Tropenmuseum in 2013. Its relationship to the work of Maria Sybilla Merian, a German entomologist, naturalist and scientific illustrator who travelled to Suriname in the 1700s to study insects, allows for dialogue between the past and the present within the museum context.