First Fountain Draft is one of several large-scale works on paper from Kara Walker's Fons Americanus archive, depicting a scene of disaster and chaos at sea. Water, for Walker, is seen as both vital and devastating; the element through which life can be given and taken away. In the context of western imperialism, water became the channel through which Europe established contact with and enacted their colonial projects upon other civilizations. In First Fountain Draft, the horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade are reframed as an darkly absurd shark attack in the middle of the ocean, as her subjects wrestle against outside forces attempting to claim their agency and lives.