“Uniting around civil rights and freedom movements of the 1960s and 1970s, many visual artists, poets, playwrights, musicians, photographers, and filmmakers expressed hope and dignity through their art. These creative efforts became known as the Black Arts Movement.
Photography was central to the movement, attracting all kinds of artists—from street photographers and photojournalists to painters and graphic designers.”
Photography Credit: David Hale
“Ayida is a new group exhibition of five early- to mid-career artists celebrating the Caribbean and its diaspora. Through a combination of new and existing works, the contributors investigate and pay attention to the material, spiritual, and intellectual cultures of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, among other sites.
Taking inspiration from Haitian poet and performer Assotto Saint (b. 1957 Haiti, d. 1994 New York), an important figure of the 1980s Black and gay writers movement, the exhibition considers Saint’s own complex relationship to Haitian Vodou, a topic frequently censored in Western societies. This impetus gives rise to Ayida’s focus on syncretism between religions and cultures, and on Afro-diaspora religions. The exhibition thus builds on dance and folklore research by the Dominican sociologist Fradique Lizardo (1930–1997) on El Gagá, a movement-based Vodou practiced in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.”
“Africana Americanxs In Transit Across the Black Kairibe is an interdisciplinary curatorial project that centers on four main critical issues: a decolonial cartography of the Caribbean that recognizes the East as a sacred cosmic orientation; an understanding of Kairibe Malunge; migration as a key component of Africana Kairibe cultural expressions; the power of ancestral memory and oral traditions; and decolonizing the Caribbean’s linguistic fragmentation imposed by European colonization….
…This curatorial project presents a hemispheric history of Black diaspora subjectivity, honoring the intellectual legacy of Howard University professor, philosopher, scholar, and cultural activist Dr. Alain L. Locke; the writings of Suzanne Césarie, Édouard Glissant, Audre Lorde, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and Jacqui Alexander; and the artistic representation of the Black Caribbean Diaspora as a constellation of visual cultures that sustain ancestral connectivity and envision a Global African futurity.”
Photography Credit: Julia Cumes and Lipe Borges
“In this exhibition, multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and scholar, Thomas Allen Harris, pulls from his vast collection of 1980s black and white photography and 1990s diaristic video entries to demonstrate the ethos of the black queer renaissance of the late 20th century.
He presents House of Haizlip—a curated selection of photographs from events programmed by his close friend and mentor, Ellis Haizlip, between 1986 and 1989 at the Schomburg Center for Research—and Tahj Diary (1990)—a video where Harris uses the camera as a therapist and discusses the end of his romantic relationship. Together, these works patchwork threads of black queer radical politics and forms of cultural expression including community development, imaginative performance, personal testimony, and self-documentation. They beckon the viewer to critically contemplate the disruptive power that these artistic and cultural strategies had for a generation grappling with the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the individualistic ethos championed by Reagan’s neoliberalism, and the rise of the Moral Majority, which pathologized kinship formations outside of white, heterosexist family structures.
By bringing these archival records into the present, this exhibit plays with time itself. It returns to the past, offering viewers an opportunity to view Harris develop his eye as he moved from photography to video and film. But it also invites the viewer to project a queerer future, a future filled with tender embraces, deep engagement, and alternative ways of being with each other.”
“How can we, as workers of the imaginary, recognize the significance and the poetics of being when all manners of racism, war and patriarchal violence redirect the gaze from our indisputable presence? For Real For Real gathers together artists working to bring us closer to the particularities, obsessions, peculiarities, playfulness, obscurity, wonderment of a single one doing life, being alive, loving, seeing, making, breaking, collapsing, doing and doing in the wild wilderness of now.”
“Resquícios e Ressonância | Remnants and Resonance brings together three powerful works created in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, each exploring the enduring legacies of Black identity and memory through the transformative power of portraiture. The title evokes fragments, traces, and residues—remnants that speak to the ghostly presence of history, the resonance of ancestral memory, and the echoes of fragmented narratives captured in photographs.
Created in Salvador da Bahia—an epicenter of African diasporic culture—these works by Thomas Allen Harris, Lázaro Roberto Ferreira dos Santos, and Joshua Rashaad McFadden delve into the complexities of Black life across generations and geographies. They highlight portraiture as a site of representation, resistance, and reimagining, shedding light on the multifaceted nature of Black identity. This exhibition interrogates the portrait as both a tool for representation and a site of resistance. Together, these works navigate the weight of oppression while imagining liberated presents and futures within the Afro-Atlantic world.
Through three distinct yet interconnected works, Resquícios e Ressonância | Remnants and Resonance underscores the transformative potential of portraiture to document, resist, and reimagine Black lived experiences. It positions portraiture as a medium that captures fragments of queer histories, ancestral religions, Black joy, and community, weaving these elements into resonant narratives that illuminate the richness of Black existence.”
