The exhibition retraces half a century of struggles for emancipation, from African independence to the fall of apartheid, to the fight against racism in France.Black Paris” highlights the aesthetic power and political force of those artists who, through their creations, have challenged prevailing narratives and reinvented a universalism “of differences” in a postcolonial world. This political background has provided the context and sometimes a direct frame of reference for some artistic practices. Parallel or in contrast, the exhibition also includes plastic experiments that are often solitary but find aesthetic links within the exhibition.
From international abstractions to Afro-Atlantic ones, passing through surrealism and free figuration, this historical journey reveals the importance of artists of African origin in the redefinition of modernisms and postmodernisms. Four installations produced specifically for the exhibition by Valérie John, Nathalie Leroy-Fiévée, Jay Ramier and Shuck One punctuate the visit and provide contemporary insights into this memory. At the center, a circular matrix takes up the motif of theBlack Atlantic, the ocean as a disc, a metonymy of the Caribbean and the “Whole-World“, to use the term coined by the Martinican poet Edouard Glissant, as a metaphor for Parisian space. Attentive to circulations, networks and friendships, the exhibition offers a lively and often completely new map of Paris.
African American and Caribbean Artists
Beginning in the 50s, African-American and Caribbean artists explored new forms of abstraction in Paris. (Ed Clark, Beauford Delaney, Guido Llinás), while artists from the continent outlined the first pan-African modernisms (Paul Ahyi, Skunder Boghossian, Christian Lattier, Demas Nwoko). In Paris, new artistic movements emerged, such as the Fwomajé group (Martinique) and Vohou-Vohou (Ivory Coast). The exhibition also presents the first postcolonial movements of the 90s, marked by the affirmation of the notion of ethnic mixing in France. A tribute to artists of African origin in Paris After the Second World War, Paris became an intellectual center where figures such as James Baldwin, Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, and Léopold Sédar Senghor met to lay the foundations of a post- and decolonial future.
Cover image detail: Gérard Sékoto, Autoportrait, Oil on cardboard, 1947, Adagp, Paris, 2024 Frank Kilbourn as Trustee of Doornbult Trust © DR
