How modern and contemporary artists across the African and
Caribbean diasporas transformed European Surrealism into a tool for
Black expression
On the centennial
anniversary of André Breton's first Surrealist Manifesto, Surrealism
and Us shines new light on how Surrealism was consumed and
transformed in the Caribbean and the United States. It brings
together more than 50 works from the 1940s to the present that convey
how Caribbean and African diasporic artists reclaimed a European
avant-garde for their own purposes.
Since its inception,
the Surrealist movement--and many other European art movements of the
early 20th century--embraced and transformed African art, poetry and
music traditions. Concurrently, artists in the Americas proposed
subsets of Surrealism more closely tied to African diasporic culture.
In Martinique, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire proposed a Caribbean
Surrealism that challenged principles of order and reason and
embraced African spiritualities. Meanwhile, artists in the United
States such as Romare Bearden and Ted Joans engaged deeply with
Surrealist ideas. These trends lasted far beyond those of their
European counterparts. Indeed, the term "Afro-surrealism"
was created by poet Amiri Baraka in 1974; today the movement still
flourishes in tandem with Afrofuturism. The Surrealism and Us
catalog is divided into three themes: "To Dare,"
"Invisibility" and "Super/Reality". These
sections, galvanized by scholarly essays, create transnational and
multi-generational connections between Black life and artistic
practice over the past 100 years.
Artists include:
Firelei Báez, Agustin Cárdenas, Myrlande Constant, Rafael Ferrer,
Ja'Tovia Gary, Hector Hyppolite, Ted Joans, Wifredo Lam, Simone
Leigh, Kerry James Marshall.