What, exactly, did Homer mean when he painted a Black man reclining on a partially wrecked boat, beneath which choppy waters and sharp-toothed sharks loom? This image, memorably depicted in The Gulf Stream, is an ambiguous one, so it’s no surprise scholars and artists have obsessed over it for over a century. And it was hardly a shock when, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Homer retrospective this year, curators Stephanie Herdrich and Sylvia Yount placed the painting front and center. But it was the unusual way that the curators approached this work that made it feel so notable right now.  Perhaps the work is really about the transatlantic slave trade, or even about the continued disenfranchisement faced because of it, even after abolition. With that in mind, a whole new view of Homer’s work emerges—an example of the manifold ways in which art history’s mysteries only deepen as new critical lenses are taken up.