The Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD),based in the San Francisco Bay Area, […] is uniquely positioned as one of the few museums in the world focused exclusively on African Diaspora culture and on presenting the rich cultural heritage of the people of Africa and of African descendant cultures across the globe.
Many Voices, One Diaspora is MoAD’s benefit auction. Bidding will be open exclusively on Artsy and will close on Thursday, May 12th at 2:00pm PDT (5:00pm EDT).
Untitled (aim for living), 2021 Archival pigment print 19 × 13 in Edition 1/5 Signed and dated in verso Courtesy of the artist and David Castillo Gallery
All courtesy the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles
The Trickster features an anthropomorphic metal sculpture adorned with daggers and chains at its center. Set against a backdrop of camouflage netting and a neon lightning bolt, hands appear to be reaching out of the ground, surrounding the sculpture. The installation is flanked by a quote from Zora Neale Hurston: “hoodoo is a blade dat cuts both ways.” In Haitian Vodou as well as the Yoruba and Dahomeyan diaspora, the trickster represents an intermediary, standing at the (spiritual) crossroads between humans and gods. Usually male, Saar’s trickster appears to have female attributes. The figure guards the crossroads for the many hands reaching up from the ground.
This major exhibition, 29 January – 25 April 2010 at Tate Liverpool, (also traveled to Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, España, July – October 2010) inspired by Paul Gilroy’s seminal book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), identifies a hybrid culture that spans the Atlantic, connecting Africa, North and South America, The Caribbean and Europe. The exhibition is the first to trace in depth the impact of Black Atlantic culture on Modernism and will reveal how black artists and intellectuals have played a central role in the formation of Modernism from the early twentieth century to today.
I made a post before. But I have recently found the dvd of installation images, dating April 2010.
“Untitled (BLCK–We wear the mask)” is part of a series of multimedia works that Miami-based artist Adler Guerrier created in 2007-2008 in the guise of “BLCK”—a fictitious collaborative comprised of artists of color ostensibly based in Miami in the late 1960s. ?
Guerrier imagines the group’s members living and working amid the warehouses and apartment complexes of Liberty City, a predominantly African American neighborhood that appears in a set of monochromatic photographs that hang on the wall. A monitor on the floor plays vintage video footage, establishing the tumultuous 1960s as the context. Against the wall are black-on-black wood protest signs and collaged prints inscribed with powerful yet hard to read messages jumbled with abstract imagery. ?
Combining the poetry of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, a speech by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the artist’s own meditations, the signs and the accompanying prints evoke artifacts from an era that brimmed with public demand for radical change, reminiscent of our own moment. #ShareBlackStories?
Installation view from Adler Guerrier : Formulating a Plot, Pérez Art Museum Miami, August 7, 2014 – January 25, 2015. Photo: Courtesy of Miami Fine ArtStudio LHOOQ.
Director of the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum, Julie Dickover, joined Flagler’s Spring 2020 Artist in Residence, Adler Guerrier, for a conversation and Q&A regarding his exhibition, Wander and Errancies. Conversation took place on Wednesday, April 22, 3:00 – 4:00pm, via zoom. 68 minutes. Video is closed-captioned.
