Palimpsests
Visual Idioms of Enslavement in the Nineteenth Century and Their Afterlives
This collaborative exhibit unearths various modes in which nineteenth-century visual idioms of enslavement endure in present-day constructions of Blackness as a site for policing, discipline, labor, desire, love, death, and/or pity, as well as the challenging responses offered by contemporary artists across the Americas to that legacy. The conceptual figure that organizes this exploration is the palimpsest—the idea of a primary inscription that both persists and is disfigured underneath the surface of a new one.
Visualizing / Performing Blackness in the Afterlives of Slavery
A Caribbean Archive
This digital archive brings together nine Black artists to reflect on forms of visualizing and performing Blackness in the afterlives of slavery in the Caribbean. Each artist was invited to create a performance/visual art piece reflecting on the legacies of slavery in their individual countries. We have chosen the Caribbean to account for multiple structures of racial domination that have produced varying iconographies of blackness. In bringing together these nine Black artists, this archive attends to the tactics of visual and embodied insurgency forged in the afterlives of slavery.