Art Africa Miami 2017 by Art Africa Miami Arts Fair

ART AFRICA 2017

BACK TO BLACK

OVERTOWN 1

KHALI SADDI As a man thinketh (2017) Plexi-mount 40” x 60”

Carrying the weight of his world (2017) Metallic c-print 16” x 20”

In Memory of Purvis Young Those who died never left: They are in the shadow that lights up And in the shadow that thickens. The Dead are not under the Earth: They are in the trembling Tree, They are in the groaning Wood, They are in the flowing water, They are in the water that sleeps, They are in the abode, they are in the Crowd: The dead are not dead. Listen more often Things than Beings The Voice of Fire is heard, Hear the Voice of Water. Listening in the Wind The bush in tears, It is the Breath of the Ancestors —-Excerpts from Souffles, Birago Diop, Presence Africaine, 1960

Front Cover: Erick Fernandez . Aerial View of Overtown Back Cover : Rhea Leonard. It’s the Forces You Don’t See (Sisters), 6’x3’, mixed media on Dura-lar, 2016 4

ABRAHAM . ACEVEDO. ADDERLY . ADUFAH .AFOLABI . AFRO FUTURISM . ANDERSON . BACHELARD . BAKER . BAILEY . BEDIA . BELL . BOYCE . CAMINERO . COOPER . CORDOVA . CRUZ . DAMATO . DAVIS . DE PALMA . DEMBY . DODARD. DUNN . EDOZIE . ELIJAH . ENWESOR . FANFAN . FLANAGAN . FUNDAMENTALISM . GERDES . DI GERONIMO . GONZALES . GUAMING . HAYE . HALL . HARDEMON . HARRIS . HOLIFIELD . HURSTON . ISLAM . KONATE . KAYIGA . LEWIS . LEONARD . LETKO . LOUDGHIRI . MARQUEZ . MARTINEZ . MBOW . MCFARLANE . MCNAIR . MCNIGHT . MCQUEEN . MICHELETTI . MIZRAHI . MOISE . MORRISON . MUDIMBE . NZEGWU . OLANIYAN . OVERTOWN . PARKER . PERALTA . PETIT . PRINCE . PIERRE . POST-BLACK . REGIS . ROBERTS . RUSSEL . SADDI . SALAS . SAUNDERS . SCHALLER . SHAHAR . SIRMAN . SMITH . SULLIVAN . SOLOMON. TAYLOR . THIONG’O . THOMAS . THOMSON . TINNIE . ULYSSE . YATES . YOUNG . WAITE . WEST . WYNTER . WOODS . YATES . VON LATES . YOUNG . PARKER . WA THIONG’O . 5

7th Art Africa Miami Arts Fair 2017

Curated and Edited by Babacar MBow

BACK TO BLACK NO ON/OFF RAMPS

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

PREFACE

MBOW BACK TO BLACK

ABRAHAM UNDER THE BRIDGE

NOTES

BIOGRAPHIES

EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS CHECK LIST

SPONSORS, LENDERS & ASSISTANCE

Greetings: The 7th edition of Art Africa Miami is an opportunity to celebrate visual expressions of the African Diaspora. Art and culture play a vital role in the development of a community. As Overtown continues its hosting of this grand event, I welcome all of Miamiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s residents and visitors to come and share our history and heritage. The Urban Collective has helped to provide an amazing platform for artist throughout the African Diaspora during Art Basel season. Through innovation and creativity, you continue to push boundaries, while achieving greater levels of excellence with each exhibition I trust that you will create an unforgettable experience and I wish you success in the years to come.

Keon Hardemon Miami City Commission Chair

PREFACE When we established ART AFRICA MIAMI in 2011, with the aspiration of “Shifting the Paradigm” of representation of African Diaspora arts in Miami, we realized what a daunting task initiating Black art and culture in its own imaginary was. Seven years later, supported by several successes, we continue charging forward. For 2017, we summoned an array of international specialists in the field who, after several visits and meetings, provided suggestions regarding the thematic concept of this 7th edition: BACK TO BLACK: No On /Off Ramps. The enthusiasm of the Miami City Commission, Overtown Community Redevelopment Agency, the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau’s Art of Black Miami, and the Florida Africana Studies Consortium have spared no efforts in their companionship with ART AFRICA MIAMI year in and out.

The indefatigable commitment of Miami City Commission’s Chair Keon Hardemon allowed us to “take to the bridge” the challenge of ART AFRICA 2017 with renewed determination. Overtown CRA granted us, again, usage of the building and financial support. In addition to the support of these authorities, we are grateful for the continued support from private and public as well as individual entities. Their contributions have made this edition possible. Their names will be given a special place in the catalogue as an expression of our gratitude. The success of ART AFRICA MIAMI 2016 ensured that we turn again to the Florida Africana Studies Consortium whose Executive Director Babacar MBow brought intellectual sophistication and commitment to Black arts to produce this edition with the participation of over fifteen internationally renowned African Diaspora artists whose works attendees will enjoy this year. Neil Hall, Founder and Chairman ART AFRICA MIAMI

ABDOULAYE KONATÉ Papillon bleu pour Fès (2016) Textile 246 cm x 403 cm

BABACAR MBOW

BACK TO BLACK

NO ON/OFF RAMPS

The effectiveness of repressed peoples in the communications struggle, either as senders or receivers through systems influenced by this hierarchy (the “image hierarchy” and ideological contours of representation” of what Michel Foucault calls “power /Knowledge”), depends on their realization of the obsolescence of the contest over the nature of truth beside the contest over the control of truth, and the irrelevance of “beauty” beside the power to choose and name beauty. From the beginning, the question of aesthetics is always a non-dialogue between those who subscribe to the conditioned world order and those who stand to gain from a reconstructed forum. —— Clyde Taylor

Introduction Black visual expressions have had many challenges during the past years with renewed assaults on their discourses and representations. Black bodies and lives have also suffered similar fates. The back-and-forth analyses that accompany these challenges are indicative of the kinds of discursive repositioning that surrounds these conversations. How has Black art responded to these assaults that currently beset the global African Diaspora? How do artists of African descent create modes of intervention no longer predicated upon legitimization from centered discourses beyond their historic and contemporary experiences? How have they provided a counter-narrative of radical autonomy unfazed by “merely restating the tacit necessity of the place of art in society”? Confronted with the resurgence of the trivialization of African Diaspora experiences, in fact, the idea of Black art’s intervention in the cultural sphere is both necessary and urgent. At issue, ultimately, is a fundamental difference in the way discourses on Black art are produced as a novelty that has no connection with African descendants’ lives and experiences. Therein, a framing of discourses in generalities that is rooted at the antipode of the Black experience. To attend to these upheavals — political, cultural, economic and ethical — BACK TO BLACK: No On/Off Ramps argues for a move beyond outdated “unicentric discourses”, to present productions dedicated to fostering anew, various loci of affiliation away from the romantic illusion of pure distance and total autonomy of Art from society. By these means, BACK TO BLACK: No On/Off Ramps reinscribes the imbrication of artistic practice in social temporality. After all, we can talk all day long about globalization of art, multiculturalism and diversity; the nowadays right of everybody to use Black images as a discursive trope of an “Open Casket”. But we are left staring in the face the obvious realities of how inequity and oppressive power are manifested then and now through racial designations as in the case of Miami’s own Trayvon Martin, the countless recent killing of young blacks and browns at the very hand of the forces that were supposed to guaranty equal protection under the law for all citizens; the bankrupt Islamic fundamentalism that is annihilating African societies on the continent and the violence perpetrated against peoples of African descent throughout The Americas. From the tribulations above, BACK TO BLACK: No On/Off Ramps is conceiving a possibility for another world; not the worlds put in place by EuroAmerican modernity. 17

These were born with the “birth defects” of slavery, segregation, colonialism and imperialism. For Greg Thomas then, “this is not the only world that has ever been; it is not necessarily the only world that was and is absolutely certainly not the only world that can ever be !” (Thomas 2004). BACK TO BLACK is not a return to a reductive essentialism but rather a pegging to the depth of blackness as a spatial and temporal strategy of resistance insisting on it as the past, present, and future to highlight Black aesthetics’ continuing “times of entanglement” with dominant representations. Here, the attempt is to think linkages of the political and the imaginary beyond the simplistic valorization of the former and the equally simplistic condemnation of the latter. The two dimensions of the political and the imaginary with their libidinal content have specific figurations in the works by artists assembled in this 7 th edition because there is no imaginary without a political-sociological context. In BACK TO BLACK: No On/Off Ramps, the political is not devoid of imaginary investments, while libidinal productions do have their own politics. Reading the political and the imaginary in art, Tejumola Olaniyan (2004) speaks of a “predicament” from the point of view of public perception of rational politics of mass empowerment and political theorizing in which [Black Arts]’ progressive politics and quest for egalitarian orderliness in political economy find ground. It is the imaginary and libidinal productions that we need now to sketch out in detail. Although "political reality is a symbolic construct produced through metaphoric and metonymic processes around points de caption and empty meanings, it nevertheless depends on fantasy to reconstruct itself ..." However, BACK TO BLACK: No On/Off Ramps clarifies that political reality also needs fantasy not only to constitute, but to ever and perpetually reconstitute itself. If the imaginary is this significant to the scheduling and reordering of politics, then ultimately what is at stake in visual productions of Black peoples is not so much its opposition to politics and imagination, but rather the kind of exercises of the imaginary. These exercises, though ideologically unpleasant, are after all salutary in their inflexible rupturing of the boundaries of hegemonic norms. Recent emergences of global political, cultural and religious fundamentalisms with their “publicly open” epistemic and physical violence are now proposed as platform for speaking of the human. The hooded regurgitations of “claiming our country back” and “America first”, so stripped of intelligence to the point of being reduced to the hiring of premature intellectuals to the highest office in the West and the mayhems “Sharia laws” and the “lord’s army” inflict on African societies — a practice of “life unworthy of life” (Sylvia Wynter) for the Muslim and Christian African fundamentalists, are parts of what may also be another plot to belittle international peace among nations, thus contributing to the inevitable erosion of what it means to be human in the twenty first century. At the heart of these fundamentalisms, racism, constitutes the right ventricle. The consequences of these upheavals include many literal nightmares for Black peoples of the earth, historically and contemporaneously excluded from what it means to be human. These nightmares appear through Kristallnacht-like parades with their paraphernalia of lit-up torches and extended arms on campuses. They are affecting both time and space. In this time-space, movement is restricted, images and ideas subverted and the human fragmented. 18

Ironically also, is how the nightmares end up being swallowed and regurgitated by the very ones who should gain from a “reconstructed forum” in their claims to trendiness by posting Black” and “just an artist”— not Black, not African! “just an artist” — an invitation to boarding a train to nowhere. The “low energy” that the regurgitation afflicts them with, renders them easily tired “of the expectations constantly placed on [them] as a featured member of [their] racial group and/or […] gender niche” but also the way they reroute Black Arts to the very extended arms now free to roam and plunder the legacy of the Black Arts movement. In this sense, Lyric Prince’s merciful interjection about five months ago (in a sisterly reminder to Kara Walker) must be understood, not as bickering, but as speaking truth to those whom much have been given, an articulation of a legacy of constant vigilance against the exclusionary constructions of the nation, the flag and other notions of citizenship; the power to name truth and beauty. The tendency of the regurgitators to “post” anything of African descent: race, colonialism, modernism even Blackness led Greg Thomas to call for examination of these addictions as an “escape hatch in a five centuries long context of Western European racism and imperialism, at least in the mentality of the propagators of…self-abolition as a new mode of neocolonial assimilation”. Thomas wondered! “when then post white”?

Confronted with these new euphemisms of an old discourse of othering and exclusion Okwui Enwezor defines as a “new paradigm of eschatological reasoning” at the bowels of new white identity politics at odd with the until recently politics of hope, we might question the sagacity of black tenants of selfabolition and announcers of the death of identity politics. For Enwezor, we live more intensely than ever in an age when identity politics at the hands of others is the first principle, the primary unit, the currency of politics and culture. Following these then, BACK TO BLACK attempts to skew the coordinates in an era set off by recent upheavals in the field of contemporary cultures. In this sense, BACK TO BLACK emerges from several specular and spectral initiatives. It aims at accounting for the various ways languages, imagemaking, objects and actions on which Black art stands against the machinations anew that erode the gains from the fights for Civil, political and economic rights by Peoples of African descent. BACK TO BLACK then articulates expressive counter-narratives against these machinations by proposing codes of familiarizations and linkages in an order of understanding different from intuitive knowledge, common sense, or appropriation. For Houston Baker, “...these begin where such modes of thought end, or at least where they fail to address questions that require for their answers more than enumeration, cataloguing, impressionistic summaries, selected lists, or non- critical formulations.” (Baker. 1989). The past decade has been a particularly challenging one for peoples of African descent. The “Hope” that sprang from the election of President Obama to the present predicament under the new Administration in the United Sates, the rise of White Nationalism in the Western world, the senseless violence of fundamentalist Islam in Africa and various violence on Black peoples in Latin America, and current perambulations inherent to “post Black” discourses constitute a strange opacity of empirical events that give rise to a suspicion that perhaps, after all, the world has no genuine order. 19

BACK TO BLACK provides opportunities for exploring how new solutions are sought to meet evolving needs. Recalling Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s identifying the metaphor of contemporary relationships, we can then engage in “…capturing and recounting the world of omens, premonitions, cures, and superstitions that is authentically ours… … looking at reality without the limitations that traditionalists …through the ages have tried to impose on it to make it easier for them to understand …[Dis] proportion is part of our reality too. Our reality is in itself out of all proportion.” If one takes Marquez’s metaphor of disproportion for example, one can think of the situational relationship of Blackness to current claims of “country” and the “flag”. However, in the BACK TO BLACK, the thinking on the paradoxes of relationships and on their capacity to grasp the essence of a conception of Black art makes one thinks of the works assembled here as the richness of African Diaspora intertextual relationships. Like how the Africans sculpt— an articulation of an asymmetrical parallelism in which color, flatness, edge; and scale, sources of influence, direction of technical innovation, approximation and divergence from realism, and subject-matter are echoes in which the euphony created by curved lines of the Black experience recalls nostalgia for a lost era in which Black arts stood against fear, illusory desires for assimilation and tacit acceptance of orbiting around a center. BACK TO BLACK sketches a mythology both individual and collective marked by cadences of the feet on Edmond Pettis Bridge, using anaphors in search of an aesthetic language capable of expressing the specificity of an experience, both historical and contemporary vis-a vis other experiences; a thematic of contradiction through images such as Black geographies that according to Boyce-Davies, are both "beautiful and merciless, hiding centuries of pain and saddled on a fault line.” For Boyce-Davies then, reading Black art requires a different understanding of space “...as a theoretical conjuncture that moves beyond flattened ...unicentric historical meanings to offer new analyses in which anticipated outcomes give way to new information.”

The issues invoked above pose then the fundamental question of Black identity in its personal and collective expressions. They express the nature of the response brought by Black Art to that question which is at the center of Black Studies. The riddle BACK TO BLACK attempts to solve is the affliction of internal division that tears through contemporary “Post-Black” peoples the world over. It sees the infinite refraction of that tearing — a crack which leaves the subject divided between his submission to the gaze of the other, confusing the density of words with the complexity of thought. In this sense, we might call to mind Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s notion of the kite having lost its mooring; remaining floating in space with no possibility of returning to earth. He famously equated to kite a tendency in the writing of theory to substitute density of words for that of thought. Ngugi warned against its ability sometimes, to obscure the clarity of thought. BACK TO BLACK can then be read at the levels of vision/division, visibility/invisibility. Division is the negative side of the question. The traces of this thematic BACK TO BLACK explores, invoking these breakings that cross African Diaspora identity; division between the oppressor and victim, colonizer and the colonized, exclusion and struggle against it; between black and white, past and present rendering the post-colonial, post-Black subject paralyzed by the gaze of the other, flabbergasted by that gaze that forces him/her to see him/herself as others see him/her. 20

The signs of division are multiples and always inextricably linked to their contrary ---the search for that freedom in which all forms of binary and duality dissolve in the articulation of a contemporary Black experience. In this paradoxical relationship between division, tearing and searching for wholeness, BACK TO BLACK sketches new paths forward. These are forms of doubling by which they remain themselves while bearing the mask of another possible articulation. In BACK TO BLACK, the vision doubles in the hope for increasing the visibility of artistic emancipation from imposed norms and canons. This doubling is enrichment and supplement of sense. Language art is here then of major concern. In the African Diaspora, as in other regions concerned with aesthetic colonization and epistemic violence; the search for a simple language, a language close to the peoples but capable of expressing a complete vision is of capital importance. Then the question of dialectical forms of aesthetic languages in the African Diaspora and its contributions to the creation of a voice that is both authentic and Diasporic. BACK TO BLACK engages this re-formulation of diasporic ties which, while having genesis in the painful history of the Middle Passage, constitute nevertheless a strategic aesthetic platform for our contemporary era just as a century earlier, the African mask provided a platform for modernism. What are the dynamics within contemporary art BACK TO BLACK addresses? The first is the way Pan Africanism operates in African Diaspora cultural discourses and more specifically how it is re-conceptualized in contemporary interactions within socio-political contexts in terms of representation. Inherent to the reconceptualizing, Black transnationalism emerges to replace old static models of center/periphery and self/Other to allow for new multidirectional interconnections of identities and cultures. The point here is that we do not cease to be related simply because separated by oceans. The second dynamic explores the notion of Blackness in relation to the rhetoric of the “post” and the ways in which the latter may appears as just a “synchronic monoculturalism”— a tacit regurgitation of the old false universalism of Europe and its diachronic evolutionism (Thomas, 2015). The threatening potential of this false universalism veiled in the “posts” can then hit before we see it coming. Thus, BACK TO BLACK articulates a discourse— an organized rubric for making sense and of categorizing Black identities and experiences. Its interest lies not in what is unique or different about a particular group but in what kinds of interests or motivations we bring to the table. The third dynamic expands the possibilities and concerns of the first two by tying them to a geography in which memory and history converge to structure a contemporary practice. Here, visual representations articulate remembrance, oblivescence nuance and association in a culture’s epistemological framework that challenges and broadens our understanding of concepts previously deemed familiar. Together, these dynamics grid the core artistic ideas of the 2017 ART AFRICA; a quest for responses to questions about a possibility to articulate the world in a significant manner and in a language reflecting the intensity of our desires and needs.

OVERTOWN ON MY MIND: No On/Off Ramps

You Know, if you stroll down the neighborhood, deep in the night, you can still hear them singing and playing…. —— An Elderly Black women in Overtown Thus, spoke the elderly Black woman at the grocery store on the corner of 8 th street and Northeast 2nd Avenue in Overtown. I had stopped for a quick purchase in my relaxed Lagos (Dutch wax fabric) outfit which, with my accent, must have led her to inquire where I was from and what was I doing in the hood. After a few minutes of exchange about Art Africa, she uttered the quotation above. The association of Art Africa with Overtown offers opportunities for exploring the effects spaces can have on memory and the construction of historical thought. One of the oldest neighborhoods of the City of Miami, Overtown (then known as Colored Town) with its share of violence both in its flesh and memory can be discussed as a model for understanding Black mnemonics and their generating of semantic dynamisms. Marvin Dunn told us of the beginning of the city in June 1896 with the first estimate by John Sewell of how many people lived in the shores of the bay. According to Dunn, of the 438 registered male voters in the precinct 182 (41.5%) were black. Dunn also points out that of 367 voters who incorporated the city of Miami, 262 were black with the first signature on the charter being that of a Black man , Silas Austin (Dunn. 2016. p57). Rooted in the history of the city of Miami itself, segregated then and now with violent scarifications interstate highways I-95, Dolphin Expressway and the Midtown Interchange inflicted on its flesh, with no possibility for entry or exit, Overtown’s hosting of Art Africa articulating —space and memory— becomes what Gaston Bachelard refers to as “topoanalysis” a space designed to store and preserve the collective knowledge of African Diaspora. Given the paradox of segregation and racism, it is Black cultural production on which America depends on for the articulation of its humanity. Yet this paradox also restricts Black access to participation. This is found again, in Overtown. To claim an avant-guard position on the national cultural scene, Miami head-lined masters such as Cab Calloway, Count Basie, Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong, Nat “King” Cole, Sammy Davis Jr., and many others; from Paul Robson, Josephine Baker and Billie Holiday to Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne and Aretha Franklin yet; They could play at Miami Beach venues but could not live in its hotel, nor eat in its restaurants. They come back to Overtown where their humanity thrived. The elder Black woman is right “you can still hear them playing and singing…!” Here, Overtown is Place memory— lieu de mémoire. Recollection as practiced here then parallels Mudimbe ‘s concept that it neither an account nor a pedigree but a meaningful configuration of selected, negotiated events that are “loci memory". (Mudimbe 988). Bachelard (1969) discussed the powerful effects that spaces can have on vivid recall by describing how people “house” their memory, and how rooms become abodes for an unforgettable past”. For BACK TO BLACK then, Overtown is a locus of memory; a landmark around which past events structure present memory. Here, memory is enacted 22

through the space, not time. Camillo’s famous “Memory Theater” of the Renaissance comes to mind as based on the proposition that spatial paradigms can shape collective memory and consciousness (Yates1966). Overtown is now subject to many speculations all designed to once again dis/relocate blacks; its proximity to downtown is a curse. Could there be another imagining of the space than the frenzy of contemporary vulture- speculators’? Art Africa provides an alternative model by operationalizing a process that embodies and enacts principles of black memory process providing thereby an architecture of memory, and a metonymic model for consciousness within which historical facts are selectively preserved and positioned to enable renewal. Art Africa is a system of representation that produces convention and invention — a process precipitated and shaped by relaying of visual information. ART Africa and Overtown then become topoi —space

ABDOULAYE KONATÉ Petite poupée orange (2016) Textile 153cm x 127cm

GEORGE EDOZIE Obiageli (2014) Fabric, mixed media, metal sculpture 102” x 42”

PHILIP THOMAS High-Sis in the garden of heathen (2017) . Mixed media on fabric. Dimensions variable

JOSÃ&#x2030; BEDIA Nkisi Nkonde (2013) Acrylic on canvas 72" x 85"

JOSÃ&#x2030; BEDIA Kongo Ndibu (2015) Acrylic on Canvas 82" x 110"

JOSÃ&#x2030; BEDIA Tres Diosas de Primavera" (2017) Acrylic on Canvas 116" x 118"

KOFI KAYIGA Quintuplets (2017) Acrylic on31 tarp 48” x 70 each”

ABDOULAYE KONATÃ&#x2030; Composition en bleu au personnage orange (2016) Textile 217cm x 187cm

ABDOULAYE KONATÉ Petite poupée orange (2016) Textile 153 cm x 127cm

PHILIPPE DODARD Materia Prima I : The Uprising (1997) Acrylic on canvas 108” x 108”

PHILIPPE DODARD Materia Prima II: The Rebirth (1997) Acrylic on canvas 108” x 108”

GEORGE EDOZIE Obinka (2014). Fabric and metal sculpture 144” x 84” x 144”

KESHIA ABRAHAM

UNDER THE BRIDGE BEYOND THE BEACH AND ABOVE THE MUCK

WORKING BLACK MIAMI

When people think of Miami they are not seeing us. The Miami that lives in the collective imagination has bright blue skies, is a place of fun, of sun, of beach, of bar, of decadence, of shopping, of acquisition, of excess and access. This Miami is clean, it sparkles, it is neat, it is open, it welcomes. Perhaps, if you are like me before I came to work here, you also associate Miami and its culture as some kind of pastel cross-section of “Scarface” and “Miami Vice” with linen suited men and bikini-clad svelte women walking the streets. In this imagined Miami, people who look and work and think like me are not part of the landscape. The vision one has, if a tourist, if coming for business, if coming to see art, if visiting family, if coming to perform, is not of Black intellectuals, Black educators, Black well-behaved audiences or, of Black visual artists. We are in many ways so far outside of the realm of people’s imagination here that sightings of Black people at the theatre becomes a spectacle in and of itself; discussed after the show as if we had been part of the entertainment. Entertainment and containment go hand in hand here – there is a vision of this place that was many would come to believe Miami to be --- that first scene in “Scarface” which takes place in the makeshift, but very real, “Tent City” epitomizes our conundrum. In this scene of chaos and exile and displacement, you may remember Pacino’s character being sent to a temporary encampment. This limbo-land became a holding ground for people whose relatives could not be found upon arrival to Miami and for those who could not be processed at Chrome detention center. So, you imagine this wild - wild west of a land locked island in the middle of a city within a city under bridges made so that no one would ever have to know or see the shame of the state of our communities. Yet this place was quite real, and it really did shape how people came to know each other and be known here. Surrounding this impromptu city was the development of the I-95 bridge system which would obscure this place from the sight of our visitors such that even now, one must drive over this town, over most of the original neighborhoods where Miami’s invisible architects and artists live and work to arrive on South Beach or any of the more affluent parts of town. Ask the residents of Overtown, Opa Locka, Little Haiti and Brownsville, who are of ages to remember the displacement and chaos that left remnants of dashed dreams, disenfranchisement and disillusionment in the soil there… where next to nothing has grown well since. The consequences of these unbalanced imagined landscapes have made it possible to do things here like knowingly attempt to build skyscrapers over ancestral lands, and move a museum of contemporary arts which was serving an incredibly diverse community all the way down to South Beach and therefore out of reach for the residents of the community it was created to be a part of. For people who have known their privilege to encompass all the beautiful and all the ugly in the world, for a people to whom all things – yes, all things – are open and possible at birth, it wouldn’t matter where one hangs art. But art is so much more than this. Art transforms by its existence and its very placement. Accessibility impacts the embodied experience of art. My students live between the bottom ends of the county – down by where the detention centers are – along the western corridor and up through south Broward. They live in neighborhoods with closed schools, abandoned houses, next door to neighborhoods where their relatives work but they can’t play. The original US housing projects, built by the military form neighborhoods city blocks long that face into each other, not out. There are no museums here. 39

There are no cinemas here. There are no banks here. On these blocks, there are no first Friday eclectic family-friendly jam sessions where you can bring little lawn chairs and baskets with wine in them and sit outside in public, legally drink the wine in public, in glasses if you like, while standing amidst local police officers, all friendly-like. Ideologically, there has been very little deliberate bridge building to share and shape community access and involvement in the arts. ART AFRICA is intended to change this by refocusing access and inclusion for all peoples, being the bridge deliberately and intentionally for peoples of color who live, love and work here. Situated in the heart of downtown Miami, locked under the bridges with no ramps for entry or exit, Overtown then becomes “a site for understanding how African Diaspora mnemonics generate the semantic dynamism and social construction of historical thought. The association of ART AFRICA and Overtown then become “topoi” that is, both place and topic where memories converge” (MBow 2016). Bridges to have to cross over, are important. Bridges and the water under them have historically separated people according to racial, ethnic, class lines in South Florida creating an even more nuanced disparity if this mainland mainstay were to be taken across the water and down to the beach. Building Art Africa in Overtown allows deliberate meaningful engagement, planning, and artistic/ cultural support for the population who makes your holiday in Miami so fabulous. The schools beyond The Beach stand to benefit even more from Art Africa which insists on not just remaining where it is but also on celebrating those it is primarily responsible for serving. ART AFRICA @Overtown has the potential to inspire others to see themselves as relevant here and beyond this place. It is possible – still, right now, and even today – that many of you would have experienced arrival into the greater Miami area by air, land or sea and never have had the occasion to pass through or bear witness to Black communities until coming to visit ART AFRICA. You land at Miami or Fort Lauderdale International and soon find yourself on highways that merge onto other highways that either take you to a beach or to a suburb. My people, our towns, are under those highways, beyond those bridges. One drives over Overtown (formerly officially known as “Colored Town”) and across to other towns like Opa Locka, where we who live here are clear is NOT MIAMI – we have our own flavor, our own pace and tenuous understanding of each other which has not been my experience of the rest of Miami- Dade. Yes, Miami-Dade is your Miami, it is our Miami, Dexter’s, “Fast and Furious’,” Crocket and Tubbs’ – it is all of that, but we who live here black, educated, and invested in arts and education, are the descendants of the living visible images artists in BACK TO BLACK put in their “Imagined Landscapes”), resurrecting our ancestors and by consequence us. The artists literally paint us back in where artists like Heade (which should have come as an ominous warning) were simply overlooked, ignored, and omitted in their official representations of the New World. And that is how it is living and working here every day as Black and of this land, of these people, in ways that none of the nation’s here seem to get. It feels like living behind the paint in an image of your home there, but invisible in all our beauty and complexity to the untrained eye. Having not studied us in schools, having only the media to shape and frame generations of beliefs, people arrive here (every day from everywhere) and remain 40

within the context of their elsewheres – identifying themselves first always with where they came from, not with where they are now. People who live here tend to self-define based on original nationhood not neighborhood which only further erases African Americans born and raised here – whose whole nation often is the neighborhood. Knowing quite intimately the lack of breadth and depth in general curricula about peoples and cultures of African descent within the United States, the expectations of who we are, what we want, what we are about, what we make, what is our aesthetic, have become internationally commodified media-enhanced caricature. None of this makes room for a woman like me, perhaps like us — born free, up North, to generations of free educated people for whom education meant formal and informal and life revolved around the study of all forms called arts to better learn from each other. Here, a woman like me is asked every day where I am from because we are too free in ways that have no context in this town and because there is no room, no imagination of the landscape of what it means to be from here – read Miami or US-born Black. There is no context or anticipation for being educated and African American. Here, where we live, we are asked in elevators after long days of teaching and cultural arts programming, “whose girl are you?” (As in whose house do you clean, or who do you work for?) But I would be labeled as the pathologically “angry Black woman” if my dissent were voiced and heard. Here, it has been acceptable to not know, to turn heads rather than engage, to dismiss on the assumption of a language barrier without even considering that it is possible to speak cross-culturally, bi or even trilingually. What many of us quickly realize, working while Black in Miami, is that being polylingual is a necessity. It is in spaces of seeing – in a place like ART AFRICA, whose intention is to help people see by providing access to imagined landscapes, that we can find our presence and explore what it means to be visible here. There is something meaningful about having a presence in the neighborhood/ being visible… it contributes to our ability to see the beautiful in ourselves and in what surrounds us. It validates our ability to see ourselves producing beauty on our own terms. It encourages our children to see themselves larger, more powerful, and more relevant. The transformative power of art and what happens around it are what creates the possibility of harmony and appreciation…when we gather, in this space particularly, around music, art, and ideas, new opportunities form. Zora is with me in this somehow. Each time I have come to live here I have felt her defining, clarifying, signifying on Black Florida. There’s something about her work read in the context of ART AFRICA that reminds me of this notion of us being the creators of a space that was never meant for occupation/ habitation, then becoming its invisible architects, still unseen. Art Africa’s home community is in many ways a microcosm of the cultures Hurston made it her life’s work to study: Southern/Floridian African American, Haitian, Jamaican, Cuban, Bahamian…The migrating seasonal farmworkers Hurston so eloquently described in Their Eyes Were Watching God are still regularly transported before daybreak from a parking lot around the corner from ART AFRICA and taken out to work in fields day in day out, shuttling to the edges of the Everglades (AKA – the Muck) and back, returning home to Overtown, Opa Locka and Little Haiti periodically. But we who have come to live and work here have realized that the muck and its politics permeate South Florida well above and beyond the glades. 41

Those unseen laborers in the kitchens of South Beach’s restaurants, those night cleaners at the hotels over on Collins, the unseen who create what makes for the perfect Miami experience, live under the bridge, beyond the beach, and just above the muck (literally and figuratively). These are often the children who grow up in these hoods to parents who arrived here free and intent on being part of a dream that all too often becomes a nightmare. Life is supposed to be sweet above the Muck. Ultimately, in at least my own experiences, as a Miami resident for just over fifteen spliced years, there is no other place that has stood for a sense of possibility like Overtown. Living in these communities, I have always seen ART AFRICA as our anchor, as a site of tremendous hope, and it is even more so now than ever. To have this major art fair with its important exhibitions and community programs is what encourages the dedication needed to do the work necessary for social change and for the possibility of a better future for people of color working with art in this region. Over time, I have seen the numbers and ethnicities of people coming for the public music events and cultural programs growing. There is an art explosion throughout certain pockets of Miami but there is no reason why this cannot touch more lives by encouraging more support for art in south Florida beyond the beach, beyond the places with big investors and even bigger wallets. Design District, Wynwood, Midtown all continue to expand and become further and further gentrified, as well as the Biscayne corridor and these are great for the county and for those who can afford to be a part of it. Overtown is a humble neighborhood with humble incomes keeping culture in profoundly powerful ways that are finding more and more support. Life can be sweet above the muck and with greater appreciation for ART AFRICA. We cannot afford to remove the center point in this development – a place where people of all backgrounds experience being in the space as equals, encountering beauty through art and culture and therefore travel and therefore expansion and therefore transformation… We are here. We are here and we are claiming our space.

RHEA LEONARD Pierce (2016 ) Mixed media on Dura-lar, 3’x 6’

BRYAN MCFARLANE Birth of a Lion - from the Beijing Series (2009) Oil on linen 72” x 60”

GEORGE EDOZIE Obiananma (2014) Fabric, mixed media, metal sculpture 144” x 48”

JOSE BEDIA Lembranรงa de Nosso Paso por Aquela Terra Brava ( 2012 ) Acrylic on Canvas 73" x 100"

PHILLIP THOMAS Tank (2017) Oil and mixed media on canvas 84” x 127”

AISHA BELL Kinky and a noted tangle slinger (2016) Clay, glaze acrylic synthetic hair 124" h x48â&#x20AC;? w x 7" Long

Tricked out trap (2015) Card board Acrylic, fabric, glass 60" h x 42"w x 72" long

ANTHONY PERALTA En La Capital (2016) Acrylic on screen-print on canvas 30” x 40”

SOLOMON ADUFAH Anita (2017) Oil on canvas /Screen –print 84” x 96”

LYRIC PRINCE Winnie (2017) Ink on paper .24” x 36”

LYRIC PRINCE Ring (2017) Ink on paper . 24” x 36”

ANTHONY PERALTA Celia con rolo (2016) Acrylic on screen-print on canvas 38” x 28”

PETER WAYNE LEWIS Eye of the Magnet (2009) Acrylic on linen 216 cm x 183 cm

RHEA LEONARD Tituba, (2016) Mixed media on Dura-lar 57 6.5’x 3’

BODO KORSIG Liberation (2012) camera: Pavel Schnabel, composition music: Philip Glass, Glass North Color/Sound, Single â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Channel Full HD Length: 2:58 minutes

ADEDOBA AFOLABI Soul Angel (2016) Acrylic on canvas 70” x 50”

ROBERT MCKNIGHT Blacknuss (2016) Charcoal on paper 60” x 40”

ANTONIUS ROBERTS Out of many (2016) Madeira Wood, Copper and Ceramics 24" x 12"

MAXIMO CAMINERO

Las Sombras de La Noche (2016) Oil, mixed media on canvas 55” x 84”

CHRISTINA NICOLA Afrogalictic: Girl and the Freudian Slip (2016) Mixed media on wood

22” x 48”

Rick Ulysse Untitled (2014) Ink on paper 18” x 24”

MILES REGIS Be Woke (2016) Acrylic on canvas 24” x 36”

EMILIO MARTINEZ American Me (2016) Mixed media on wood 8’x 4’

NOTES Back to Black: No On/Off Ramps 1

The subtitle of this 7th edition No On/Off Ramps is borrowed from an essay by Dr. Heather D. Russell, “Post-Blackness and All of the Black Americas” in The Trouble with Post-Blackness. Houston A. Baker and K. Merinda Simmons ed. (New York, NY: Columbia University Press 2015). The essay takes to task Touré's notion of Blackness in Who’s afraid of post-Blackness: What it means to be Black by asking us to consider “what counts as something called “black experience...and the ways in which nation, empire and questions of diaspora complicate discussions of an imagined “black identity”

Clyde Taylor, “Black Cinema in a Post-Aesthetic Era” in Questions of Third Cinema, /“Black Jim Pines and Paul Willeman, ed. (London: British Film Institute, 1989), 90

Tejumola Olanyan, Arrest the Music! Fela and His Rebel Art and Politics.(Indiana University Press, Ind.2004).

Sylvia Wynter, Facing the New Millennium

Lyric Prince, Dear Kara Walker: If You’re Tired of Standing Up, Please Sit Down in HYPERALLERGIC/Opinion. August 29, 2017 https://yperallergic.com/398123/ dear-kara-walker-statement-response/

Greg Thomas, African Diaspora Blackness Out of Line: Trouble for “Post-Black” African Americanism in The Trouble with Post-Blackness. Houston A. Baker and K. Merinda Simmons ed. (New York, NY: Columbia University Press 2015).

Okwui Enwezor, The Unhomely: Phantom Scenes in Global Society, Introduction to the catalogue—- 2nd International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville (BIACS) 2006

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Interview “The Fragrance of Guava” London; Verso 1983

Carole Boyce Davies, Art and the Politics of a Caribbean Aesthetic:—Foreword: Plugging Identities in Contemporary Haitian Art. Babacar MBow ed.; Florida Africana Studies Consortium, Miami 2011.

—-Caribbean Spaces: Escapes From the Twilight Zones; University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 2013

Houston A. Baker, Jr. and Patricia Redmond ED., Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s, (Chicago: University Press of Chicago, 1989 ).

Marvin Dunn, Black Miami in the Twentieth Century, University Press of Florida, 2016.

Mudimbe, V.Y. The Invention of Africa, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press 1969.

Frances Yates, The Art of Memory, Chicago University Press, 1966.

UNDER THE BRIDGE 1.

De Palma, Brian. “Scarface”. 1983

Dunn, Marvin. Black Miami in the Twentieth Century. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997.

Hurston, Zora Neale. Zora Neale Hurston: Novels and Stories: Jonah’s Gourd Vine/ Their Eyes Were Watching God/ Moses, Man of the Mountain/ Seraph on the Swanee/ Selected Stories. New York: Library of America, 1995.

Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings: Mules and Men, Tell My Horse, Dust Tracks on A Road, Selected Articles. New York: Library of America, 1995. 68

ARTISTS’ BIOGRA PHIES ABDOULAYE KONATÉ graduated from the National Institute of Arts in Bamako, Mali and the Higher Institute of Plastic Arts from Havana, Cuba from 1978 to 1985. His practice evolved in the 90s to move towards the textile he rediscovered and appropriated to realize his works. Recognized worldwide, he has received numerous awards, including the Leopold Sedar Senghor Grand Prix of the Biennale d' Art Contemporain Africain of Dakar in 1996, the decorations of officer of the National Order of Mali and Chevalier des Arts et Letters of the French Republic in 2002. Konaté participated in numerous exhibitions and international biennials; Documenta 12 Kassel 2007, Africa Remix (2004-2007); The Divine Comedy, (2014). A career retrospective is scheduled by the Museum of Art of Tunisia in 2018. AISHA TANDIWE BELL is inspired by the fragmentation of our multiple identities. Bell’s practice is committed to creating myth and ritual through sculpture, performance, video, sound, drawing and installation. Bell has had artist residencies/fellowships at Skowhegan, Rush Corridor, Abron’s Art Center, LMCC’s Swing space, The Laundromat Project, and BRIC. She is currently a 2017-2018 LMMCC workspace fellow. She is a current fellow at The Venice Biennial 2017. WILLIAM CORDOVA was born in Lima, Peru and lives in Miami and New York. He graduated with a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1996) and MFA from Yale University (2004). He has participated in numerous artist residencies including The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; American Academy in Berlin, Germany; Artpace, San Antonio, TX. Exhibitions include the Whitney Biennial, Havana Biennial, Prospect.3 Triennial. JOSÉ BEDIA was a pioneer of the radical transformation of Cuban Art that inaugurated the Exhibition Volumen 1, which Bedia was an integral part of. His passion for the primal Amerindians complemented his anthropological studies on Afro-Transatlantic cultures, studying in depth the beliefs and religions of the “La Regla Kongo” (in which he was initiated in 1983), the “Regla de Ocha”, and the Leopard Society of Abakuas, among many others. He traveled to Angola as part of the International Cultural Brigades who supported the struggle of the Angolan-Cuban War against the then racist regimes of Namibia and South Africa.

GEORGE EDOZIE is an MFA graduate of the University of Benin, NIGERIA. In 2015 , the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami Florida dedicated a solo show of his works.. Collected by major museums of Contemporary art in the US and Europe such as the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the Harlem Studio Museum, Edozie is also the co-author of the book 101Contemporary Artist---a Celebration of Modern Nigerian Art. Edozie is a co-founder of the Art group ARTEZO. He was part of the exhibition Africa Now organized by the World Bank for emerging African Artists at the World Bank main complex Washington DC USA in 2008 and African Way of Art, La Galerie Vendome Paris France in 2011. PETER WAYNE LEWIS. A Professor of Painting at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, and the former Chairman of the Fine Arts 2D Department, Peter Wayne Lewis has exhibited extensively in Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, USA and Asia. Recent exhibitions include a survey of paintings produced in his studio in Beijing, China at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, UCCAUllens Center of Contemporary Art Beijing, China at the China Art Museum Shanghai, China. PHILIPPE DODARD is the Director of the National School of the Arts of Haiti. A graduate of the International school of Bordeaux, France . Dodard explores the iconographies of the Taino, Arawak and African masks to engage a process of synthesis in search of different answers to our seemingly irresolvable human problems. The works of Dodard have been collected in museums in Europe and the United States, inspiring Donna Karan for her 2012 Fall collection. MILES REGIS. Tapping into the emotional experiences of exotic cultures around the world and presenting them in ways that are relevant to today’s modernized societies, Regis favors the simplicity of black and white structure, starkly juxtaposed with the complex dimensions of color; recurring motifs include his use of eyes, encouraging the viewer to look deeper. His paintings are often layered with vibrant hues, powerful imagery, text, abstract brush strokes, and purposeful objects.

RHEA LEONARD is a current MFA candidate at Florida International University. Engaged in the process of re-membering, she constructs the body as surface and interior, container and contained- a “place of meeting and transfer” where memory is created, perpetuated, and sustained. In her works, body memory is intrinsic to the body and to how we remember in and by and through the body; the black body in its becoming a site of inscriptions of pain and of history and thereby able to evoke a particular memory. Here, it is about unmasking memory’s bodily experience. For Leonard these body memories are consistently invoked and populate the works as bodies of pain, of loss, of trauma, distorted Middle Passage bodies in the surrounding field. ROBERT MC KNIGHT is a graduate of Syracuse University BFA 1974 and studied sculpture at Sir John Cass School of Art from 1971-72. McKnight has exhibited extensively in the United State and realized major public artworks in Miami. He is a founding member of the Miami Black Artist Workshop and the KUUMBA Art Collective . ANTHONY PERALTA. New York native and first generation Dominican, Tony Peralta is a contemporary artist and designer known for his fusion of pop art aesthetics, cultural iconography, and vibrant hues. While living in a home dominated by Dominican culture, Peralta developed a deep appreciation for American art. His engagements with works such as Andy Warhol Keith Haring, Frida Kahlo, and HipHop culture inspired him to creatively explore his identity. The relevance of his work has gained a growing number of followers and some of his works are owned by Junot Diaz, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Swizz Beats. Through social media and e-commerce undertakings known as The Peralta Project, he continues to artistically connect and engage with his followers. Just recently, Peralta’s “Celia Con Rolo” was exhibited at the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum in D.C. .MAXIMO CAMINERO’s work is rooted in the exploration of the Taino megaliths that grid the Caribbean and the relationships of these to the African legacy. Therefore, his paintings seem to be sculpted on the canvas on which forms of the past resonate in the present to always articulate the Caribbean and African Diaspora predicament. Caminero poses an expressive discourse around an ontological dignity, historically grounded, channeled through the arts, which must still work with contemporary instruments of the politics of representation; particularly in artistic practices and discourses.

EMILIO MARTINEZ’s work emerges from intense experience and memory of displacement. These are populated by spirit-figures of his ancestral culture with its capacities to accompany the travelers crossing the border. The plastic language is not necessarily that of constant innovation but of deconstruction of the dominant forms, through borrowing and hybridizing. The voice that emerges from it is the voice of the Wretched of the Earth with all its suffering and pain. But it is also a voice of hope for a return to the human. Martinez has been in a group exhibition at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, Florida , which has revealed him to be a rising figure in the local scene. ANTONUIS ROBERTS is a graduate of the Philadelphia College of Art (now University of the Arts, Philadelphia PA). His work focuses on the interconnectedness of humans, spirituality and nature. An active conservationist in the Bahamas, he is the Curator of the Central Bank of Bahamas Gallery. Roberts has participated in international exhibitions including the Wiesbaden Museum, Germany, and the 8th Changchun International Sculpture Symposium, China. Roberts’ works are included in numerous notable collections in the U.S., South Africa, Italy and throughout the Caribbean. SADDI KHALI focuses on “Decolonizing Beauty”. His photography has been featured in magazines such as ESSENCE, and on the covers of books, like Random House’s TRIKSTA. Saddi has exhibited works, internationally, including at Rush Arts Gallery in New York and the Coast Gallery in Johannesburg, South Africa. In 2014, he co-produced the historical fantasy short film "ASE" shot on location in Nigeria and currently produces short-form documentaries on crime-survivors. SALOMON ADUFAH has a BFA in Fine Art/Painting from Southern Illinois University. Born and raised in Ghana, Adufah has lived in Chicago, Illinois for the past nine years. He has been concerned with the negative perception of Africa. Adufah sees that his home is only seen under the lens of war. Using his artwork as a tool to react to this narrative, Adufah crafts a personal mission to empower, promote and celebrate African culture through his portraits.

RICH ULYSSE attended Florida A@M University where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. His most recent body of work has been an ongoing collection of drawings and collages exploring history, mythology and folklore, with a interest in Haitian and Caribbean identity. While in line with a story telling tradition; his works are nonlinear, reject chronology, and strive for subjectivity by remaining open-ended as a means to achieve universal and crosscultural connections. KOFI KAYIGA is an artist and educator, who migrated to the US, after periods spent in the UK and Uganda. He has exhibited widely internationally and since the 1960s has taught fine art at various institutions, becoming a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MassArt). His work has been characterized as influenced by Africa and Jamaican folklore and religious themes. Kayiga's world is not one of idealism mediated through the diaspora experience. Instead, he is the only artist who channels a first-hand experience of Africa into his work, resulting in an immediacy and directness that consists of bold strokes, vibrant color fields and symbolic language." PHILLIP THOMAS was born in 1980, in Kingston Jamaica. Thomas received his BFA in Painting in 2003 from the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts and received the Albert Huie award for painting at the end of his studies. He later earned his MFA at the New York Academy of Art. Phillip Thomas has exhibited extensively locally and internationally and is represented in major collections. In his oil paintings and mixed-media works, Thomas combines the imagery and traditions of the Old Masters with contemporary textures and patterns to create a new iconography. LYRIC PRINCE was born “sometime last century” in Richmond, VA. A graduate of Drexel University, Philadelphia Pa. (M.S. in Science, Technology, and Society) and St. Joseph’s University, Philadelphia Pa. (B.A in Fine Arts and French), Prince’s multidisciplinary articulations rupture the boundaries of hegemonic norms, particularly through exploring Afrofuturism.

BODO KORSIG explores human behavior under extreme conditions such as fear, violence, pressure, and death. He is especially intrigued by the artistic conflict of those neurological and cognitive processes inside human beings that are difficult to record from a scientific standpoint. Korsig has exhibited in over 100 museums and galleries, both in his native Germany and internationally. His work is in over 40 museums and public collections. CHRISTINA NICOLA graduated from the University of Central Florida with a Bachelor’s degree in studio art, specializing in drawing and painting. She focuses on highlighting the significance of black men and women through her work. Using a variety of mark making techniques such as charcoal, oil, pastel and other mediums her latest series “Lifebloodlust”, explores the Black experience in the context of modernity. Nicola examines negritude, and the search for strength and pride in culture and society. ADEDOBA AFOLABI worked as a graphic artist with the British Overseas Development Office of the UN and taught at Yaba College of technology in Lagos Nigeria prior to his coming to New York. His success at several exhibitions propelled his momentum. He is proud of his first Solo exhibition tagged 'Buffalo Soldier' in 1999 at the art district of North East Miami in Florida and several other shows curated by Asmar Gallery . BRYAN MCFARLANE is a Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. He has just completed a three year project with research scientists jointly with EMMAS and TERC looking at the Microbiome, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in addition to a previous three year project at MIT, “Synergy” in Oceanographic science, from which he developed works presented in a series of exhibitions, including the Boston Science Museum, 2014. He has been a visiting professor at several universities in the USA, China and Jamaica. McFarlane has exhibited internationally and has works in collections, including Meditec Labs Cooperation, Shanghai Normal University, Sunshine International Museum, Beijing, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the Museum of the National Center of AfricanAmerican Artists, Boston.

EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS CHECK LIST (sans ordre particulier ) Pgs. 2-3 Khali Saddi As a man thinketh (2017) Plexi-mount 40” x 60” Carrying the weight of his world (2017) Metallic c-print 16” x 20” Pgs. 4, 24, 36-37,45 George Edozie Obinka (2014). Fabric and metal sculpture 144” x 84” x 144” Obiageli (2014) Fabric, mixed media, metal sculpture . 102” x 42” Obiananma (2014) Fabric, mixed media, metal sculpture 44” x 48” pgs. 14-15, 23, 32,33 Abdoulaye Konaté Papillon bleu pour Fès (2016).Textile. 246 x 403 cm Petite poupée orange (2016). Textile. 153 x 127cm Composition en bleu au personnage orange (2016) Textile 217x 187cm Petite poupée orange (2016) Textile 153 x 127cm Pgs. 26-27,28-29 ,46 Jose Bedia Nkisi Nkonde (2013) Acrylic on canvas 72" x 85" Kongo Ndibu (2015) Acrylic on Canvas 82" x 110" Tres Diosas de Primavera (2017) Acrylic on Canvas 116"x 118" Lembrança de Nosso Paso por Aquela Terra Brava ( 2012 ) Acrylic on Canvas 73"x 100"

Pgs. 30-31 Kofi Kayiga Quintuplets (2017) Acrylic on tarp. 48” x 70 ” Pgs. 34-35 Philippe Dodard Materia Prima I : The Uprising (1997) Acrylic on canvas 108” x 108” Materia Prima II: The Rebirth (1997). Acrylic on canvas 108” x 108” Pgs.43, 56-57 Rhea Leonard Because What We Say is Gospel, (2016) Mixed media on Duralar, 3’x6’, Tituba, (2016) Mixed media on Dura-lar, 6.5’x3’ Pgs. 25, 47 Phillip Thomas Thank (2017). Oil and mixed media on canvas 84” x 127” High-Sis in the garden of heathen (2017). Mixed media on fabric Variable dimensions P. 51 Solomon Adufah Anita (2017). Oil on canvas / Screen –print . 84” x 96” Pgs. 50, 54 Anthony Peralta En La Capital (2016) Acrylic on screen-print on canvas . 30” x 40” Celia con rolo (2016) Acrylic on screen-print on canvas 38” x 28” P. 66 Miles Regis Be Woke (2016) Acrylic on canvas P. 48, 49 Aisha Bell Kinky and a noted tangle slinger (2016).Clay, glaze acrylic synthetic hair 24" h x48w x 7" Tricked out trap (2015) Card board Acrylic, fabric, glass.60" h x 42"w x 72"

P. 67 Emilio Martinez American Me (2016) Mixed media on wood 8’x 4’ P. 60 Robert McKnight Blacknuss (2016) Ink on paper 50” x 50” P. 61 Antonuis Roberts Out of many (2016)Madeira Wood, Copper and Ceramics 24" x 12" Pgs. 62-63 Maximo Caminero Las Sombras de La Noche (2016) Oil mixed media on canvas 55” x 84” p. 64 Christina Nicola Afrogalictic: Girl and the Freudian Slip (2016). Mixed media on wood. 22” x 48” P. 65 Rick Ulysse Untitled (2014) Ink on paper 18” x 24” P. 56 Bodo Korsig Liberation (2012) camera: Pavel Schnabel, composition music: Philip Glass, Glass North Color/ Sound, Single –Channel Full HD Length: 2:58 minutes P. 44 Bryan McFarlane Birth of a Lion - from the Beijing Series (2009). Oil on linen 72” x 60” P. 52,53 Lyric Prince Winnie (2017) Ink on paper 24” x 36” Ring (2017) Ink on paper 24” x 36” P.74 William Cordova Silent Parade or the Soul Rebel Band vs. Robert E. Lee (2014) Single Channel video 9m. 4s photographer: Michiko Kurisu. 72

9mns. 54s