By The Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
Curated by Grace Anezia-Ali and C. Daniel Dawson
The Race, Myth, Art and Justice exhibition celebrates a community of voices who illuminate how conscious truth-telling art continues to serve as a powerful tool for justice.
Race, Myth, Art and Justice explores intersecting ideas of race, myth, art, and justice through the lense and unique interpretations of twelve inter-generational photographers.
Via innovative contemporary art practices, the photographers engage with the premise of “race” as a social construct rooted in myth, while simultaneously interrogating its profound implications and indignities on our 21st century lives.
Race, Myth, Art and Justice (2019) by Photo: Argenis ApolinarioThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
“We are in a historic moment of heightened racism, of myths designed to further fracture a young nation still on the path of healing and dealing with the inhumane ravages of enslavement. Myths presented as truths frame a narrative of increased racism, exclusion, poverty, incarceration and displacement.”
Race, Myth, Art and Justice (2019) by Photo: Argenis ApolinarioThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
“...Yet our creative actions through demonstrations, through rallies at the steps of officialdom or the stoops of El Barrio are art in motion. It is the eye of the artist-photographer that captures those magical moments that bear witness to the greatness of what we have been, are capable of, and are doing for our future. They ignite our imaginary, implore us to assume the responsibility that we must value, fight for, and embrace, truth!”
Dr. Marta Moreno Vega
Multidisciplinary Intersectional Project Coordinator, Race, Myth, Art and Justice
President, Creative Justice Initiative
Founder, Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute
Race, Myth, Art and Justice (2019) by Photo: Argenis ApolinarioThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
“Adjusting to America as a new immigrant came with tremendous struggles; what I was not prepared for, however, was the trauma of having to reconcile myself as a raced body. I found the labels “other,” “minority,” and “alien” acts of erasure. The constant onslaught of other people’s language, other people’s labels, other people’s framing, was daunting. Language matters. No human being is a “minority.” Just as no human being is “illegal.” This too is a great myth; one that has had irreparable damage on our collective psyche.”
Grace Aneiza Ali
Co-Curator, Race, Myth, Art and Justice
Assistant Professor, Art & Public Policy, New York University
Race, Myth, Art and Justice (2019) by Photo: Argenis ApolinarioThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
“With the passing of the musical artist and cultural icon Randy Weston, it is appropriate to draw a parallel between his exemplar life and art and those of the artists in the exhibit Race, Myth, Art and Justice. Like Weston, our artists—Kwesi Abbensetts, Faisal Abdu’Allah, Terry Boddie, John E. Dowell, Jr., Adama Delphine Fawundu, Jonathan Gardenhire, Deborah Jack, Zoraida Lopez-Diago, Radcliffe Roye, Ming Smith, Stan Squirewell, and Deborah Willis—have all honored their African or African Diasporic heritages in theme, style, and practice. Like Weston, they all celebrate and utilize the power of myth in the formation and transformation of history, sense of self and contemporary society. And finally, like Randy Weston, the artists in Race, Myth, Art and Justice realize that it is their responsibility to use their tremendous talents in the pursuit of justice for humanity and the environment, fulfilling a spiritual and moral obligation to make this world a better place for us now and for the future.”
C. Daniel Dawson
Co-Curator, Race, Myth, Art and Justice
Race, Myth, Art and Justice (2019) by Photo: Argenis ApolinarioThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
KWESI ABBENSETTS (b. Guyana 1976)
#s 4 (top) 3 and 7 (bottom, left to right) from the series The Masking: Super Powers, 2015. Digital photography. | Essay by Claude Grunitzky
The colored signs, symbols and signifiers that are carefully—and sometimes symmetrically—embedded or superimposed on the faces of Kwesi Abbensetts’s models seem to point to the artist’s own understanding of illusion.
#4 (2015) by Kwesi AbbensettsThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
These images, from his series The Masking: Super Powers, are all about transformation, or rather photography’s power to transcend reality by transforming and ennobling certain people who are chosen as subjects precisely because they bring a new set of imaginations to the ancient art of representation.
#7 (2015) by Kwesi AbbensettsThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
Abbensetts treats his model as a co-creator of stories, of long-forgotten histories. It might be a story about hybrid identities, and how we sometimes choose to hide behind masks in order to shield ourselves from the unwanted gaze.
Or it might be a story about how we often prefer to protect ourselves from the forces of immediate judgment. It can even be a story about refusing to conform, denying the observer the ability to perpetuate certain problematic norms about blackness.
#3 (2015) by Kwesi AbbensettsThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
Without hyping on the sociocultural, these black faces are quietly bringing the pulse back to classic black-and-white portraiture.
Race, Myth, Art and Justice (2019) by Photo: Argenis ApolinarioThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
They are part of an archeology that is taking place right now, all over the African diaspora, as a new generation of artists and image-makers decides to revisit and revise old-fashioned (and often racist) ideas of what black beauty is supposed to be.
Excerpt from “Tomorrow You May Not See Me at All”
By Claude Grunitzky
Faisal Abdu’Allah (b. United Kingdom 1969)
The Last Supper I, 2012. Jacquard tapestry. | Essay by Bárbaro Martínez-Ruiz
The Last Supper (2012) (2019) by Photo: Argenis ApolinarioThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
In The Last Supper I and II, Abdu’Allah engages in an exchange with classical art historical pieces which have also clearly influenced the history of photography. At first glance, the careful posing of the people in the photos creates a feeling of having documented a single moment in time.
The Last Supper II (1996/2010) by Faisal Abdu'Allah & Kofi AllenThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
Like in Wenceslaus Hollar’s etchings, The Bowing Gentleman and Lady with a Houpette, Abdu’Allah photographs his subjects in full costume, paying particular attention to highlighted details such as the gun, ring, and religious garments as well as elements symbolic of status including emblems of labor such as boots, popular fashion icons like baseball caps and coats, and domestic references like the wooden bowl.
The visual symbols speak to the way in which popular culture is transformed visually and coded using the body as medium, and in which beauty, politics, cultural identity, and leisure are realized largely as intellectual achievements of the vernacular culture.
The Last Supper I (2012) by Faisal Abdu'Allah & Kofi AllenThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
Abdu’Allah also deliberately engages with Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. The symbolic sharing of a religious and spiritual legacy alludes not only to Western religious tradition, but also to Abdu’Allah’s own early tradition within the Pentecostal faith in Jamaica and the United Kingdom.
Abdu’Allah replaces the traditionally portrayed Jewish guests with newly reverted Afro-British Muslims; the apostles with modern ‘townies'.
Through these transformed images, Abdu’Allah negotiates a new type of inclusion within the realm of religious artwork, and advocates that discourse around issues of hybridity, creolization, and syncretism as essential cultural and conceptual phenomena is critical to understanding the colonial context in which African slaves were forced to abandon their own religious heritage in favor of conversion to Christianity, as well as the role of British culture in a post-colonial era.
Excerpt from “The Last Summer”
By Bárbaro Martínez-Ruiz
Terry Boddie (b. Nevis 1965)
Prison Industrial I, 2018. Archival digital inkjet print. | Essay by Christopher Cozier
Prison Industrial I (2018) by Terry BodieThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
I knew the Brookes slave ship illustration of the late 18th century abolitionist posters from my Caribbean history schoolbooks. Seeing it placed next to the flags of African nations transformed and shifted it into a pop culture vocabulary of the moment.
Boddie’s fluid placement of the prison bars, the transactional bar code, and the iconic slave ship illustration bring the social systems of the alleged past into dialogue with our present—the criminal enterprise of trading in captured, incarcerated, and transported Black bodies.
Excerpt from “Blueprints”
By Christoper Cozier
John E. Dowell (b. United States 1941)
Do They Remember?, Bursting Out, The Long Road, and Sending the Message (left to right) from the series Cotton, 2017-18. Archival pigment print on photo rag paper. | Essay by Brittany Webb
Bursting Out (2017) by John E. DowellThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
When John E. Dowell Jr. sees cotton, he sees red. He sees labor—plantation slavery and all its attendant violences—the role it played in inventing Black Americans as a race of people, brutalizing ancestors physically, mentally, psychologically, fracturing family trees.
Sending the Message (2018) by John E. DowellThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
The physical violence of the harvesting practice and lived experience of enslavement, the psychic violence of dehumanization that extends past life into deaths marked by mass graves, the hypocrisy of churches and parks associated with a public good—these all haunt these cherished, seemingly innocuous public spaces.
Do They Remember? (2017) by John E. DowellThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
Dowell sees this violence and its erasure. Sees the haints and saints and wants you to see them, too.
The Long Road (2017) by John E. DowellThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
Dowell’s Central Park is Seneca Village. His Washington Square is a sacred burial ground, his New York City a plantation. Historic churches appear in the contemporary city on blood-saturated soil.
Race, Myth, Art and Justice (2019) by Photo: Argenis ApolinarioThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
Dowell’s photos remind us of cotton’s role as a New York wealth generator by ensuring we see it as the grounds out of which these great institutions grew. Cotton is literal, figurative, and spiritual. It lies in fields, chokes Wall Street high rises, crowds the contemporary urban streets. It comes into focus, seemingly with arms and legs. It comes at you. It flies out of chimneys and church organ pipes, swirls about dreamy and menacing, and dares us to confront its soft and cutting histories.
Excerpt from “John Dowell’s Cotton”
By Brittany Webb
Adama Delphine Fawundu (b. United States 1971)
the cleanse, 2017 (left). HD Video, 10:28 min. Passageways #3, #2, and #1 (right; from left to right) from the series Secrets,Traditions, Spoken and Unspoken Truths or Not, 2016. Archival inkjet print on archival fiber paper. | Essay by Niama Safia Sandy
Race, Myth, Art and Justice (2019) by Photo: Argenis ApolinarioThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
Fawundu’s series, Secrets, Traditions, Spoken and Unspoken Truths or Not, features the artist pictured in the embraces of her godmother (Passageways #1) and mother (Passageways #2)— women who have nurtured her all her life.
Passageways #3 (2017) by Adama Delphine FawunduThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
Each woman dons garments of cotton fabric made in Sierra Leone; some by Fawundu’s paternal grandmother and aunt, others by the hands of women who themselves were likely taught in the embrace of a woman who wanted to ensure a woman could endure.
Passageways #1 (2017) by Adama Delphine FawunduThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
The borders of the images are also adorned in fabrics sourced from all over the African continent—hand-sewn, dyed, stamped, designed in villages all over Nigeria, Ghana, textures placed in relief through a process of scanning digitizing.
In Passageways #1, the artist listens intently as her godmother whispers into her ear, perhaps hoping for some morsel of wisdom not yet uncovered.
Passageways #2 (2017) by Adama Delphine FawunduThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
The second image portrays Fawundu’s head resting in her mother’s lap, ear nestled in the folds of the fabric of her mother’s skirt, perhaps waiting for whispers of the past for guidance.
In both images perhaps the viewer is being encouraged to seek the knowledge layered into the patterns of the fabrics; the fact that the vêtements themselves carry as much love and sweat equity, as they do secrets that only the cotton fibers may be able to tell the tale, and the intrepid journeys and lived experiences of the people who hold, fold, and are adorned by them.
the cleanse (2017) by Adama Delphine FawunduThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
the cleanse, Fawundu’s first foray into video, is an invocation of abundance, ritual and rhythm, rites of passage, exaltation, and a tethering of Black feminine beauty to divinity and genius. Shot at 120 frames per second, with a running time of 10:28, every movement is in high definition allowing for the reading of every gesture as doubly deliberate. For many Black women there is a cultural more against the proximity of water to one’s hair; smiling gleefully, Fawundu wets her straightened hair with aplomb. Festooned with bolls of cotton, she bathes her hair in milk and honey, an age-old signifier of fertility and abundance. All of this under a hybridized chant-trap music peppered with the powerful prose of the 20th century’s most prolific Black writers. It seems she intends to celebrate the return of the hair—perhaps as a metaphor for the mind—to its natural state; to a place wherein it can expand enough to make the connections between the Black Diaspora’s cultural, critical, and conditioned forms.
Excerpt from “Secrets, Traditions, Spoken and Unspoken Truths or Not”
By Niama Safia Sandy
Jonathan Gardenhire (b. United States 1992)
Untitled (A Mighty Fortress is Our God/Imperfect Man), 2017. 8 archival pigment photographs. | Essay by Patrick Bova
Untitled, (A Mighty Fortress is Our God/Imperfect Man) (2017) by Jonathan GardenhireThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
Untitled, (A Mighty Fortress is Our God/Imperfect Man) was made as a portrait of Julius Eastman, the Black, gay post-minimalist composer who passed away from AIDS-related complications in 1990 at the young age of 49.
Here, Eastman is constructed from what has been left of his making. In a wild arrangement, open books are strewn with xeroxed musical scores, hypermasculine erotica, and portraits of the composer.
Several images are sampled and resampled throughout the work: a glistening, headless torso; an inverted image of a derby race with horses mid-gallop; men blurred, their identities shrouded. These disparate allusions constellate no singular image of Eastman, and thus leave no singular tale of who he was for us to take away.
Race, Myth, Art and Justice (2019) by Photo: Argenis ApolinarioThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
How can a life be rendered from discrepant accounts? Gardenhire does not claim to speak for Eastman. Instead, much like a composer, he arranges this visual score to let Eastman—and by extension the hyper-visibility of Black men—project his own voice and vision out of the archive and into a more subjective being.
Excerpt from “A Matter of Rhythm”
By Patrick Bova
Deborah Jack (b. Netherlands 1970)
Untitled from the series what is the value of water, if it can’t quench our thirst for …, 2016 (left). Digital photography. the water between us remembers…, 2016 (right). Digital video, 15:43 min. | Essay by Oneka LaBennett
Race, Myth, Art and Justice (2019) by Photo: Argenis ApolinarioThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
Deborah Jack's work powerfully re-centers our understandings of Black girlhood throughout the Caribbean and across the African diaspora. Reflecting tensions between innocence and maturity, departure and arrival, she evokes a journey of self-discovery and the remembering of a painful past.
Untitled (2016) by Deborah JackThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
Displaced, yet determined to resituate herself, the girl featured in what is the value of water, if it can’t quench our thirst for . . . is a perennial traveler in dialogue with the global, historical Caribbean.
Untitled (2016) by Deborah JackThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
Framing the question, what is the value of water, if it can’t quench our thirst for . . . reorients us around nourishing a Black body that has labored—a thirsty body, not a tourist body at rest. Intimately connected to the land and sea, the girl is heir to a brutal past both distant and immediate, and to an unknown future.
Untitled (2016) by Deborah JackThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
Caribbean girlhood moves from periphery to the center, and the girl is the subject who gazes outward, negotiating critical spaces in cross-cultural and trans-historical navigations.
Excerpts from “Caribbean Girlhood, Perennial Survivors and Shifting Shorelines”
By Oneka LaBennett
Zoraida Lopez-Diago (b.United States 1981)
La Virgen de Los Angeles (left), and The Daughters of Kronos (right) from the series Hija del Sol, 2014. Mixed media, analog and digital photography. | Essay by Natalie Hopkinson
La Virgen de Los Angeles (2014) by Zoraida Lopez-DiagoThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
The artist Zoraida Lopez-Diago writes of her subject, “I found my mother, a recent immigrant from Panama during this period of the 1960s and 1970s, to be full of youthful vibrancy, endless possibilities, and adventure..”
The Daughters of Kronos (2014) by Zoraida Lopez-DiagoThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
The photograph’s title evokes the Greek Kronos, or God of time, something fleeting and precious for women of color. Time is a thief of certain ideals of beauty, good health, the opportunity to pamper one’s self, and moments to be adored by the camera.
As a pair, these images speak to the myths around beauty, and the notion of visibility, and remembrance. The woman in the photograph is not lost to time or history. She is remembered, held, seen, centered in the frame. Her value is not in relation to husbands, lovers, children, or other family. She is whole in and of herself.
Excerpt taken from “Daughters of Time”
By Natalie Hopkinson
Radcliffe Roye (b.Jamaica 1969)
Cotton Field, 2014 from the series When Living Is A Protest. Digital photography. | Essay by Garnette Cardogan
Orange Jumpsuit (2014) by Radcliffe RoyeThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
People’s attempts to wrench dignity from indignity is squarely in the gaze of Radcliffe “Ruddy” Roye, who uses his camera to draw us into presences and meanings that are abundantly in plain view but frequently hidden in our blind spots.
Bullseye (2014) by Radcliffe RoyeThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
His eye is focused on lives in public—the world beyond the front door, where many with black skin who step outside have to calibrate their fear to other people’s fear of them. Roye records the mundane aspects of daily life and reveals them to be anything but mundane; in his photographs, people constantly negotiate what it means to have dignity in the face of innumerable forces arrayed against this basic human quality—thus the title of his ongoing project: When Living Is A Protest.
He sees them, those fathers and sons and mothers and daughters and grandmothers and neighbors and strangers who insist that their lives are no less valuable because of the mere fact of their blackness.
Cotton Field (2014) by Radcliffe RoyeThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
He pays attention to them, those communities vying not to be erased. And he looks at them with warmth and directness—in his photos, dignified faces stare straight at us, us at them—as he beckons us to see, too.
Excerpt from “Hands Up”
By Garnette Cadogan
Ming Smith (b.United States)
Pan Pan Lady (Betty) ca.1990s (left) and Little Lil Kim, 2006 (right) Harlem, NY. 35mm black-and-white photography with oil paint Vintage gelatin-silver print. | Essay by Tao Leigh Goffe
Little Lil Kim (2006) by Ming SmithThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
Drawing with light amongst the shadows of Harlem, Ming Smith presents two women in her portraits Little Lil Kim and Pan Pan Lady (Betty). In one, a little girl who looks to be no more than four years old is anxious to grow up and in another, a woman, perhaps in her 80s, is poised at a diner counter.
Pan Pan Lady (Betty) (2006) by Ming SmithThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
One is brimming with the frenzy and vibrancy of youth, the other possesses a patience and stillness that comes with age. They could be the same woman, captured by the camera, suspended in time
Race, Myth, Art and Justice (2019) by Photo: Argenis ApolinarioThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
Paired together, the images question the roles allotted for Black women, indicting the limiting myths about them. Like the women who wander the streets at night in McKay’s Harlem Renaissance poem, Little Lil Kim and the Pan Pan Lady navigate race, space, and gender between public and private realms.
Smith says their names, Lil Kim and Betty, resonating with the collective protest “Say Her Name” where naming is an act of justice.
Yet, Ming Smith, who understands that seeing is also an act of justice, frames the tenderness of these everyday lives, typically unnoticed and unrecorded.
Race, Myth, Art and Justice (2019) by Photo: Argenis ApolinarioThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
She uses light to compose amongst dark shadows. And in the words of Gordon Parks, she “grasps them and gives eternal life to things that might well have been forgotten.” [1]
Excerpt from “Dress-up Play”
By Tao Leigh Goffe
[1] Maurice Berger, “A Photographer Who Made ‘Ghosts’ Visible,” The New York Times, January 11, 2017.
Stan Squirewell (b. United States 1978)
Taken to the Water (left) and The Vast Nothingness Between Here and There (right), 2014. Acrylic on pigment print. | Essay by Seph Rodney
Race, Myth, Art and Justice (2019) by Photo: Argenis ApolinarioThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
It's difficult to tell with Stan Squirewell’s series of painted photographs of Black men whether they are rising out of the dark waters beneath them or being inexorably swallowed up. They live on the edge of dissolution, their faces hidden, their bodies contorted in what might be a turning away or a turning toward the viewer.
In Taken to the Water, the figure’s hands reach up to cover the face—perhaps in a gesture of self-comforting, perhaps hiding—as the liquid sparsely pools under his head and leaves little rivulets fleeing those hands. It feels decisive that Squirewell chose to show the complex, intricately spiraled texture of his hair: it looks buoyant, keeping the figure afloat, while a void underneath him beckons.
In The Vast Nothingness, The Place Between Here and There, mostly what is visible is a scarred shoulder of the subject and a portion of his torqued back which is immersed in an inky blackness beneath him that might be the waters of Lethe, in which the figure may well be drowning.
Race, Myth, Art and Justice (2019) by Photo: Argenis ApolinarioThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
Squirewell tells me that he wanted to bathe these subjects in blackness, and the idea of melanin—the biological pigment that occurs in us and in most organisms on the planet and which helps protect us from the harmful effects of UV radiation—gave him his primary motif.
Excerpt from “Between the Light and Dark”
By Seph Rodney
Deborah Willis (b. United States 1948)
Gestures,Villa La Pietra, Florence; Blackamoor Table Base, Florence Shop Window; and Blackamoor Earrings, Florence Shop Window (left to right) from the series Myths and Gestures: Objects among Objects 2013-18. Archival digital C-print. | Essay by Pamela Newkirk
Gestures (2014) by Deborah WillisThe Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI)
The ubiquity of black iconography in Italy’s shop windows and majestic spaces is at once confounding and arresting. The embellished beauty and social meaning of the Blackamoors—the decorative figurines depicting Black subjects dating back to the 15th century—are instantly apparent and unchanged by time. In her images, Deborah Willis confronts that tension, shifting to the beholder, the burden of history.