Négritude, an experimental multi-disciplinary exhibition at Exit Art, explores the visionary 20th century political and artistic movement of the same name — coined by the Senegalese poet, playwright, and politician Aimé Césaire in the 1930s — which flourished among Black intellectuals in post-World War I Paris and later spread to Africa, the United States and the Caribbean.

This exhibition seeks to define Négritude as an “archipelago”, or an extensive concept and movement, with many “islands”, or perspectives. Négritude involves the collaboration of several curators that represent African-American, African, Caribbean and South American cultures, presenting multiple “islands” on contemporary definitions of Négritude. Each individual was asked to curate their “island” by presenting a visual exhibition or series of public events that detail their own experience, interest, or study of Négritude.

Négritude was a celebration of shared black heritage and an affirmation and valorization of pan-African identity and was a direct response to the effects of the African slave trade, French colonization of West Africa, and the New World plantation system. Under the influence of Césaire, the Guianan Léon Damas, and Léopold Sédar Senghor, the future president of Senegal, Négritude became a global movement, ultimately becoming radicalized and re-envisioned as a strict rejection of the domination of “the West”.

Showcasing several generations of African-American, Caribbean, South American and African artists, performers and writers, Négritude features work that examines the history, impact, and transmutations of this cultural movement. It looks beyond the historical Négritude movement to investigate also the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance and Modernism in the 1920s and 30s; contemporary responses to the concept of “blackness”; and the notion of “post-black” art coined by curator Thelma Golden in the 1990s to refer to a younger, post-Civil Rights generation of black artists who have new perspectives on racial identity and politics.

Through a series of mini-exhibitions, film screenings, performances, readings, stories and discussions, Exit Art will examine the historical effects and contemporary impact of Négritude by exploring its archipelago, island by island.

Curated by Papo Colo, Tânia Cypriano, Rose Réjouis, Franklin Sirmans, and Greg Tate.

ABOUT THE CURATORS

Papo Colo, Exit Art’s Co-Founder and Cultural Producer has curated more than 100 visual art, performance, theater, film and video projects at Exit Art and has produced a significant body of work that specifically addresses the culture of the Caribbean and his Puerto Rican ethnicity.

Tânia Cypriano has been working between the United States and her native Brazil for nearly twenty years. Her films have won international awards including Best Documentary at festivals in New York, Los Angeles, Brazil and Burkina Faso. Recently she served as Line Producer on Lady by the Sea, a one-hour documentary about the Statue of Liberty, written and directed by Martin Scorsese and Kent Jones. She has also worked as a film curator for MoMA, the Anthology Film Archives, the Museum of Image and Sound in São Paulo, as well as the Grazer Kunstverein in Austria. In 2009 she is launching docsBRAZIL, a distribution project for Brazilian documentaries in the US.

Franklin Sirmans is the curator of contemporary art at the Menil Collection, Houston, Texas. A former U.S. Editor of Flash Art and Editor-in-Chief of Art AsiaPacific magazines, Sirmans has written for several journals and newspapers on art and culture, including The New York Times, Newsweek International, Art in America, ArtNews, Grand Street and Essence Magazine. He is also an internationally recognized independent curator, editor and lecturer with specialized knowledge of contemporary African-American art.

Greg Tate, a cultural critic, journalist and author, has written extensively on racial identity in America and contemporary African-American culture. A longtime contributor to the Village Voice, he is currently writing a biography of James Brown.

Rose Myriam Réjouis is a scholar in French and Francophone literature and an Assistant Professor of Literature at The New School. Her 1997 translation of a novel by Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau won the American Translation Association Lewis Galantière Prize for Best Book. She recently translated Veillées pour les Mots, a selection of critical essays on Aimé Césaire, Patrick Chamoiseau and Maryse Condé.