A mirrored map showing North America fastened to Africa instead of South America welcomes visitors to the National Gallery of Art'due south (NGA) newest exhibition, "Afro-Atlantic Histories." Created past Hank Willis Thomas, the 2020 artwork—titled A Place to Call Abode (African American Reflection)—testifies to the "feelings of connectedness and detachment that many African Americans have toward Africa," notes the NGA in a statement. Looking at oneself in the artwork's reflective surface allows viewers to stake their position in the historical and gimmicky racial narratives of the Usa.

"[A] mythical connexion to Africa is embedded in your identity, but many people go to Africa looking for home and don't find it because our roots are so diluted there," says Thomas in the statement. "They likewise never felt at home in the U.Southward., where they were built-in. I wanted to brand a place where African Americans come from."

Thomas' map is one of more than 130 artworks and documents featured in the Washington, D.C. exhibition, which explores the impact of the African diaspora in Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean and Europe between the 17th and 21st centuries. Broadly defined equally the mass dispersion of peoples from Africa, often through forced migration nether the transatlantic slave merchandise, the diaspora has a rich cultural legacy, with diasporic fine art expressing Blackness in disparate places beyond the Atlantic.

Hank Willis Thomas, A Place to Call Home (Africa America Reflection), 2020, stainless steel with mirrored finish
Hank Willis Thomas, A Place to Call Dwelling house (Africa America Reflection), 2020, stainless steel with mirrored finish Jack Shainman Gallery, New York © Hank Willis Thomas / Courtesy of the Artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
Zanele Muholi, Ntozahke II, (Parktown), 2016, photographic wall mural from digital file sheet
Zanele Muholi, Ntozahke Ii, (Parktown), 2016, photographic wall landscape from digital file canvass National Gallery of Art, Washington / Alfred H. Moses and Fern Thousand. Schad Fund / © Zanele Muholi. Courtesy of the artist, Yancey Richardson, New York, and Stevenson Cape Town / Johannesburg

Start exhibited at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) in Brazil in 2018, "Historias Afro-Atlanticas," equally the show was chosen and then, explored the Portuguese wordhistórias, which "tin cover both fictional and not-fictional narratives of cultural, economical, personal or political character," according to 2021 NGA statement. "The term is plural, diverse and inclusive, presenting viewpoints that have been marginalized or forgotten."

Similar its original iteration, "Afro-Atlantic Histories" argues that multiple histories are at play at whatsoever given time—a view that has go increasingly mainstream in recent decades. Though every society has a widely accepted history, alternative narratives omitted from the history books also exist. Some survive through oral traditions, while others are siloed in the communities that experienced them.

"We [have started to] understand history differently in the past twoscore or fifty years," says Molly Donovan, curator of contemporary art at the NGA. "We're working in dissimilar ways to tell histories. Information technology enables united states to tell improve stories."

Dismantling the notion that the U.S. was the world's leading proponent of slavery is a key goal of the exhibition, says Donovan. In truth, of the roughly 10.7 million enslaved Africans who survived the journey to the Americas between 1525 and 1866, around iv one thousand thousand (almost 40 percentage) ended up in Brazil. Comparatively, some 388,000—about 4 percent—were enslaved in North America.

Kerry James Marshall, Voyager, 1992, acrylic and collage on canvas
Kerry James Marshall, Voyager, 1992, acrylic and collage on sail National Gallery of Art / Corcoran Collection (gift of the Women'due south Committee of the Corcoran Gallery of Art) © Kerry James Marshall

"Afro-Atlantic Histories" alludes to slavery'southward global impact by spotlighting artists from 24 countries. Globe-renowned African American artists similar Kerry James Marshall, Theaster Gates and Aaron Douglas are joined in the show by such international figures as Brazilian Eustáquio Neves, Grenada-built-in Canute Caliste and Haitian Senèque Obin.

"It'southward about reorienting the viewer, and in society to reorient the viewer 1 has to, as a curator, orient their own stance and one'due south own understanding," says Donovan.

By exploring the many narratives of the African diaspora, the exhibition encourages visitors to notice the similarities between diasporic communities around the world. Though these people might not share the aforementioned language, they have a fundamental experience in common: Under the institution of slavery, they were forced to develop new cultures that blended remembered traditions of their homelands with life in the New World.

"Afro-Atlantic Histories" is carve up into six thematic sections, including Maps and Margins, Everyday Lives, and Resistances and Activism. In Rites and Rhythms, works such every bit Pedro Figari's depictions of Uruguayan Candombe dances and Jaime Colson'due south Merengue (1938) document the religious and spiritual practices of Haiti, Brazil, the Dominican Democracy, Jamaica, the U.S. and other countries. The diaspora'southward multicultural bent is evident in the show's discussion of Vodou, Umbanda and Candombe, all of which are based on the Due west African Yoruba religion. Every bit the exhibition notes, many enslaved people skillful Christianity in evidently sight only continued post-obit African religious traditions in individual. Some worshipped Cosmic saints every bit African deities.

Samuel Fosso, Self‐Portrait (as Liberated American Woman of the '70s), 1997, printed 2003, chromogenic print
Samuel Fosso, Self‐Portrait (every bit Liberated American Adult female of the '70s), 1997, printed 2003, chromogenic print The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum purchase funded by Nina and Michael Zilkha © Samuel Fosso, courtesy Jean Marc Patras Galerie, Paris

Writing in 2005, scholar John Peffer described African art history as "associated more with a dual sense of place." The art of the African diaspora reflects the cultures and lived experiences of people estranged from their native state, surviving through faith in the lands where they were enslaved. According to Peffer, diasporas "often represent a historic and traumatic migration, or serial of migrations, into the lands of another, which later coalesce into communities cocky-defined in resistant relation to the host country."

Through the exhibition, visitors run into how the traumatic experience of slavery fostered like experiences throughout the U.Due south., the Caribbean area and Brazil. Forbidden to alive as they would have in Africa, enslaved Africans demonstrated resilience by developing new religions and cultural practices.

Another section of the exhibition, Enslavements and Emancipations, examines how the savage reality of slavery sparked rebellions and abolitionist movements. It includes diagrams of ships where enslaved Africans were packed beneath deck in unsanitary weather condition on the two-calendar month voyage across the Middle Passage. Approximately 1.8 million people died on this journey; often, the dead and the dying remained chained to the living until their bodies were thrown overboard.

Restraint, a 2009 etching by artist Kara Walker, similarly speaks to the horrors of slavery. The artwork shows a silhouette of a head, rendered in Walker'south stark signature style, wearing a contraption designed to prevent speaking, swallowing or lying down. Based on an bodily torture device, the bridle is outfitted with bells that would have alerted slaveholders to whatever move.

The exhibition contains both hard moments and much beauty. Douglas' Into Chains, for instance, embodies the suffering and resilience that often go hand in hand in "Afro-Atlantic Histories." The 1936 painting depicts men in chains, heading to ships sailing from Africa to the New World. A sense of promise pervades the scene, in which a solitary figure gazes up at a star—mayhap the same one that guided so many enslaved people to freedom.

Aaron Douglas, Into Bondage, 1936, oil on canvas
Aaron Douglas, Into Bondage, 1936, oil on sheet National Gallery of Art, Corcoran Collection (museum purchase and partial souvenir from Thurlow Evans Tibbs, Jr., The Evans-Tibbs Drove) © 2021 Artists Rights Lodge (ARS), New York

The Portraits section, meanwhile, celebrates the Black body. A highlight is Barkley Leonnard Hendricks' George Jules Taylor, an enormous 1972 portrait of a stylishly dressed Black man. The work is intimidating for its size also equally its mastery, with the confident field of study's pose testifying to the spirit of African American people in the face of oppression. Other featured works include self-portraits, which co-curator Kanitra Fletcher describes in the exhibition catalog every bit a way for Black artists to "configure new roles and ways of understanding their ain lives and histories."

"One tin never perceive or portray oneself fully and must objectify the self to return it equally an artwork," Fletcher writes. "In the perception of oneself as something necessarily 'other,' however, the artist gains distance and, by extension, freedom to imagine who she is or could exist."

Unlike many other exhibitions centered on African diasporic fine art, "Afro-Atlantic Histories" moves away from African American culture as the standard. Smaller than its Brazilian counterpart, which featured 450 works by 214 artists, the D.C. exhibition nevertheless offers a new arroyo to global history—one that contradicts the myth of a atypical narrative in favor of multiple. "It's ... a new world history framework that approaches information technology not from within national boundaries, which is very much how historiography of Western civilisation has been told," says Donovan. Through the exhibition, we see the people, from the enslaved to the royal, who literally built earth cultures on their backs through sweat and toil.

" Afro-Atlantic Histories " is on view at the National Gallery of Fine art in Washington, D.C. through July 17, 2022.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Eko Skyscraper, 2019, acrylic and colored pencil on panel
Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Eko Skyscraper, 2019, acrylic and colored pencil on panel National Gallery of Art, Washington / Purchased with back up from the Ford Foundation © Njideka Akunyili Crosby / Image courtesy the artist, Victoria Miro and David Zwirner
Unidentified artist, Don Miguel de Castro, Emissary of Kongo, circa 1643, oil on panel
Unidentified artist, Don Miguel de Castro, Emissary of Kongo, circa 1643, oil on panel Statens Museum for Kunst (SMK), Copenhagen
Alma Thomas, March on Washington, 1964, acrylic on canvas
Alma Thomas, March on Washington, 1964, acrylic on canvas Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY
Dalton Paula, Zeferina, 2018, oil on canvas
Dalton Paula, Zeferina, 2018, oil on sail Museu de Arte de São Paulo, gift of the creative person on the occasion of the "Afro-Atlantic Histories" exhibition © Dalton Paula
Frank Bowling, Night Journey, 1969–70, acrylic on canvas
Frank Bowling, Night Journey, 1969–seventy, acrylic on sail The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, gift of Maddy and Larry Mohr, 2011 © 2021 Artists Rights Order (ARS), New York / DACS, London

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