‘Afro-Atlantic Histories’ Comes To Los Angeles County Museum Of Art

The scope of “Afro-Atlantic Histories” seems so gargantuan as to be almost laughable. A single exhibition aiming to outline the transatlantic slave trade and its legacies in the African diaspora.

Four hundred-plus years of history across three continents touching hundreds of millions, if not billions of people, if not everyone. Thousands of books and feature-length documentaries have tackled the subject and there is still more to stay. Still stories left untold.

Yet somehow, improbably, “Afro-Atlantic Histories” succeeds. Spectacularly. Marvelously. Dramatically.

A 100-track compilation album managing to cohesively, coherently achieve even more together than the sum of its astonishingly brilliant parts.

While of course not comprehensive, “Afro-Atlantic Histories” does brilliantly land this critical message among others: Africa is everywhere.

Initially organized and presented in 2018 by the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Brazil with over 400 artworks, trimmed down versions of the show have been presented to rave reviews at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and most recently the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. where Vice President Kamala Harris visited the show.

“This is world history, and it is American history, and, for many of us, it is also family history,” Harris said at a preview event. “Yet this history is rarely taught in our schools or shown in our museums.”

Next stop: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

“The ambition of the exhibition is to diversify the art historical canon by foregrounding the power of art made by Africans and their descendants in the Americas,” Rita Gonzalez, the Terri and Michael Smooke Curator and Department Head, Contemporary Art at LACMA, told Forbes.com. “This is by no means a task that can be accomplished in one exhibition.”

For the better part of a year, opening December 11, 2022, and running all the way through September 10, 2023, LACMA hosts the show featuring artworks produced in Africa, Europe and the Americas over the last four centuries. Major paintings, drawings and prints, sculptures, photographs, time-based media art, and ephemera. The range extends from historical paintings to contemporary works.

Familiar items include the widely reproduced British Abolitionist document “description of a slave ship” (1789), an illustration clinically detailing a slave ship’s cargo hold, human beings aligned like toothpicks. “The Scourged Back,” a photograph published in 1863 sickeningly highlighting the whipping scars raised on a Black man’s back. Arthur Jafa’s wall mounted sculpture, Ex-Slave Gordon (2017), dramatically responds to the picture.

Alma Thomas’ March on Washington (1964) surprises as a rare figurative painting by the well-known abstractionist, recalling her experience attending the storied demonstration. Glenn Ligon’s painting Untitled (I Am a Man) (1988) was inspired by signs carried in the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike which protested unsafe working conditions and low wages.

Dominican artist Jaime Colson’s lively Merengue (1938) pays homage to his country’s national dance and music, a blend of Afro-Caribbean rhythms and African movements. Kara Walker’s 2009 etching Restraint, pictures a silhouetted figure locked in a grotesque iron brindle device incorporated by slave traders.

South African Zanele Muholi’s towering self-portrait in the manner of the Statue of Liberty stops visitors in their tracks.

As should Aaron Douglass’ resplendent, Into Bondage (1936), a singular bit of genius communicating both the despair of enslavement and the joy of freedom. A painting displaying such impact and luminosity, rendered in his unique mashup of Cubism and Art Deco, as to make attending the show worthwhile all by itself.

“Works of power” in words of National Gallery of Art Curator of African American Art Kanitra Fletcher.

Indeed.

“The imaging of peoples of African descent in the Americas is not typically considered in visual arts exhibitions,” Gonzalez said. “In a sense, this exhibition provides an introduction to the somewhat recent institutional attempts to complicate and globalize art history, including the diversifying of collections by the museums that were involved in planning this exhibition.”

More than 100 artworks, each one a showstopper.

Archibald Motley. Faith Ringgold. Kara Walker. Hank Willis Thomas. Alison Saar. Betye Saar. David Driskell. Kerry James Marshall. Charles White. Beauford Delaney. Elizabeth Catlett. Theaster Gates. Titus Kaphar. Jacob Lawrence. Benny Andrews. The exhibition checklist reading like the roster of an All-Star game. Artists possessing the heft to meet the presentation’s grandiose vision.

Eugène Delacroix!

“The exhibition does not aspire to include all the information, academic analysis or artistic responses to the history of slavery and its pervasive legacies in the Americas, rather, the ambition is to showcase a series of nuanced conversations amongst artworks, historical facts and diverse models of representation,” Gonzalez said. “’Afro-Atlantic Histories’ is more a departing point than a destination.”

Reexamining from a global perspective histories and stories of enslavement, resilience and the struggle for liberation, the U.S. tour builds on the exhibition’s overarching theme of histórias—a Portuguese term that can encompass both fictional and non-fictional narratives of cultural, economic, personal, or political character. Portuguese being the official language of Brazil, a remnant of colonization. The term is plural, diverse, and inclusive, presenting marginalized or forgotten viewpoints.

The exhibition will also introduce most visitors to the terms “Afro-Atlantic” or “Black Atlantic,” a place marked by the transatlantic slave trade and its forced movement of African peoples across the Atlantic Ocean. This is a geography lacking precise borders, where the vast culture of the African diaspora was disseminated.

A culture it would be difficult if not impossible to now say dominates the regions where it was brutally introduced centuries ago. A triumph of light rendered from a nearly unimaginable darkness.