Black Art Near + Far

Exhibits and Events

Black Art Near + Far is dedicated to art exhibitions and events, locally, nationally, and internationally.  This edition features exhibits in Miami (Charles Humes, Jr.), Boston (Loïs Mailou Jones), Hartford (Merik Goma), Los Angeles (Henry Taylor), New York (Wangechi Mutu), New Orleans (Jacob Lawrence), Sewanee, TN (Marielle Plasir), Richmond, VA​( Isaac Julien), Venice, CA​ (Alison Saar), ​Washington, DC (Bisa Butler, Amy Sherald),  London (Thornton Dial), Sharjah, UAE(Okwui Enwezor), Paris (Faith Ringgold).   

Scroll down to find artists  that interest you. 
​Come back often to see what's happening! 
​

South Florida

 Miami, FL

An Elegy to Rosewood ​

An Elegy to Rosewood explores the struggle for public recognition of the region’s legacy of white supremacy and state-sanctioned terrorism, featuring new work by Miami-based artists—Rhea Leonard, Charlisa Montrope, Chire  Regans, and Tori Scott. In January 1923, when Jim Crow laws mandated racial discrimination, a white mob that included Ku Klux Klan members killed and permanently displaced Black residents of Rosewood, FL. State officials suppressed reports of the massacre.   Rosewood, Florida, marks 100 years since the race massacre. Here’s what happened. Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, Modesto Maidique Campus, 10975 SW 17th St., Miami, FL.  Runs through April 16, 2023.

From Top Left to Right: Rhea Leonard, Tori Scott, Chire Regans(VantaBlack), Charlisa Montrope

Hampton Art Lovers Presents: Charles White, Move On Up!

Charles White, Move on Up features artwork  from The Christopher Norwood Collection and Florida Memorial University Special Collection, including work of  Charles White as well as Benny Andrews, Hale Woodruff, Henry Tanner, John Biggers, Samella Lewis, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Ernie Barnes, Barrington Watson,  Marvin Weeks, and more. Historic Ward Rooming House, 249 NW 9th Street Miami, FL Runs through March 31,  2023.

Rembrandt Reframed: Charles Humes, Jr., Jennifer Printz, and Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz

Rembrandt Reframed :Charles Humes, Jr.,  presents  the expansive visual art practice of Charles Humes, Jr.   For over fifty-years, the artist has centered Black experiences, racial inequities, historic atrocities and celebrated Black families, Black lives, and daily life experiences.  Humes, a Miami native, is experiencing a local renaissance as a featured contemporary artist in the Rembrandt Reframed exhibition at The  Patricia and  Philip Frost Museum, Modesto Maidique Campus 10975 SW 17th Street, Miami, FL. 33199, running through  January 8, 2023;  and with solo shows at Oolite Walgreens Windows, 7340 Collins Ave, Miami Beach, FL, USA 33141, which runs through November 13, 2023, and  Center for Global Black Studies,  University of Miami, Merrick Building, Room 305 5202 University Drive Coral Gables, FL 33146, which runs through  May 1, 2023.

Charles Humes, Jr.

Longshoremen Local 1416 ​

Longshoremen Local 1416 is part of Miami Museum of Contemporary Art of the African Diaspora’s (Miami MoCAAD) public art mural  series, Veo Veo, I See I See, Mwen Wè Mwen Wè. Miami MoCAAD's  interactive mural honors the International Longshoremen Association (ILA) Local 1416, an essential part of the Overtown community since its founding in 1936. ​The mural, created by Miami-based artist  Reginald O'Neal and curated by Donnamarie Baptiste, features QR codes containing oral  history videos about Miami’s Black Longshoremen and Overtown. On view at ILA Local 1416 Union Hall, 816 NW 2nd Ave, Miami, FL Ongoing.

Reginald O'Neal, Longshoremen Local 1416,
​Courtesy Miami MoCAAD

Miami MoCAAD: OVERtown: Our Family Tree

OVERtown: Our Family Tree is part of a mural series, Veo Veo, I See I See, Mwen Wè Mwen Wè, an interactive public art project exploring Overtown through visual art, storytelling and technology commissioned by Miami Museum of Contemporary Art of the African Diaspora (Miami MoCAAD) and curated by Donnamarie Baptiste. The mural, created by Miami-based artist Anthony “Mojo” Reed II,  honors the late Judge Lawson E. Thomas, who as a lawyer fought fearlessly for civil rights of Black people during the 1940s and 1950s Jim Crow era.   Judge Thomas  owned the Overtown law office building  where the mural incorporates QR codes containing oral  history videos about Judge Thomas and Overtown.  On view at 1021 NW Second Ave, Miami, FL.

Mojo, OVERtown: Our Family Tree, Courtesy Miami MoCAAD

Didier William: Nou Kite Tout Sa Dèyè ​

Didier William: Nou Kite Tout Sa Dèyè  is the largest retrospective of Didier William’s career. Translated as “We’ve Left That All Behind,” the show presents an in-depth look at the North Miami-raised artist’s career and memory among the very neighborhood where he once grew up. Curated by Erica Moiah James, Ph.D, the exhibition features over forty works spanning multiple mediums, and including some of his newest paintings. Complementing the painted work, and speaking to the close relationship of painting and printmaking in William’s practice, are new drawings and artist books. The show also includes William’s first monumental sculpture: a 12-ft.-tall wooden body emblematic of a religious column present in Haitian worship rituals.  MOCA North Miami, 770 NE 125th St., North Miami. Runs through April 16, 2023.

Didier William

Leah Gordon: Kanaval

  Kanaval , a retrospective by photographer, filmmaker, curator, collector and writer Leah Gordon that documents twenty years of Carnival in Haiti. Curated by MOCA Curator Adeze Wilford, the exhibition consists of a series of black-and-white photographs taken on a mechanical medium format camera that are contextualized by a series of oral histories.  MOCA-North Miami, 770 NE 125th St., North Miami. Runs through  April 16, 2023.

Leah Gordon

Atlanta, GA

Black American Portraits at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art

Black American Portraits travels to Atlanta’s Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, and reframes portraiture to center Black American subjects, this time placing Black women portrait artists center stage. A new painting by Calida Rawles, who celebrates her 25th anniversary as a Spelman College alumna this year, and a photograph of Spelman Alumna Stacey Abrams by Sheila Pree Bright join the collection. 350 Spelman Ln SW, Atlanta, GA.  Runs through June 30, 2023.

Boston, MA

Touching Roots Black Ancestral Legacies in the Americas

Touching Roots Black Ancestral Legacies​ in the Americas exhibit focuses on artworks that derive from rich legacies of the African Continent. The exhibition brings to the forefront artists from the Americas, including Loïs Mailou Jones, Wifredo Lam, Richmond Barthé,  Kofi Bailey, Karen Hampton, and Stephen Hamilton.  Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Avenue of the Arts, 465 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA.  Runs through May 21, 2023.

John Wilson, maquette for Eternal Presence, modeled 1985, cast 1998 Bronze. William Francis Warden Fund. © John Wilson / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter: “I Ain’t a Woman”

Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter: “I Ain’t a Woman” showcases film and photographic work to discuss reproductive injustices that many Black women and girls face in the United States. Baxter references her own experiences and exploitative photographic works of Thomas Eakins to investigate inequalities in representation that many Black people face. Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY. Runs through Aug. 13, 2023.

Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter

Hartford, CT

My Heart is Light in the Void

New Haven-based photographer and artist Merik Goma art creates opportunities to look at things from different perspectives. In My Heart is Light in the Void. Goma tells a story through a photograph, carefully manipulating the placement of each object and the lighting, creating captivating and thought-provoking images. The Amistad Center for Art & Culture at Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 600 Main Street Hartford, CT 06103. Feb 9 through March 31, 2023

Merik Goma

Los Angeles, CA

Henry Taylor: B Side

Henry Taylor : B Side surveys thirty years of Henry Taylor’s work in painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation.  This retrospective celebrates a Los Angeles artist widely appreciated for his unique aesthetic, social vision, and freewheeling experimentation and is the largest exhibition of Taylor’s work to date. The Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 South Grand Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90012. Runs through Apr 30, 2023.

Henry Taylor, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo credit: Fredrik Nilsen.

Afro-Atlantic Histories

Afro-Atlantic Histories features paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, photographs, time-based media, and ephemera including historical paintings by Frans Post and Édouard Antoine Renard to contemporary works by Kerry James Marshall, Alison Saar, Hank Willis Thomas, Kara Walker, and more. LACMA 5905 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA. Runs through Sept. 10, 2023.

Left to right: Allison Saar, Nolwen Cifuentes for The New York Times; Kerry James Marshall, 2006

New York, NY

Black Power Naps at Museum of Modern Art​

Conceived by Navild Acosta and Fannie Sosa, Black Power Naps is an interactive installation at MoMA that allows visitors to practice rest as a form of reparation and repair for historical and ongoing injustices. The artists are reclaiming the lost art of relaxation in the name of those who were denied it in times of enslavement, whether it's physical or within the mind. Museum of Modern Art 11 W 53rd St, New York, NY. Runs through April 16, 2023.

Left to right: Navild Acosta, by Goodyn Green; Fannie Sosa

Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined

Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined will feature over one-hundred works by Kenyan-born artist, Wangechi Mutu. Emphasizing the progression of Mutu’s process, Intertwined aims to provide a narrative to the artist’s personal experiences and Kenyan roots and its relationship to her art. A major solo exhibition, this will be a survey of Mutu’s multimedia approach to representing complex themes ranging from colonialism to Afrofuturism. New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, NY.  Runs from March 3 - June 4 2023.

Wangechi Mutu

The African Origin of Civilization ​

The African Origin of Civilization exhibition features collections from west and central Africa alongside art from ancient Egypt for the first time in The Met’s history. The exhibit allows introspection of different African cultures and eras while providing a rare opportunity to appreciate the extraordinary creativity of the continent across five millennia. The Met Fifth Avenue 136, 1000 5th Ave, New York, NY.   Ongoing.

​Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s 
​The Brad Johnson Tape, X – On Subjugation

Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s The Brad Johnson Tape, X – On Subjugation beacons Brad Johnson (American, 1952–2011), a Black gay poet whose “embrace of violence, sex, cruising, and, more importantly, his investment in love” shaped his work.   Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, Manhattan, The David Geffen Wing. The exhibit is ongoing.

Tiona Nekkia McClodden at Brooklyn Museum during Black Lunch Table's Wikipedia Editathon for We Wanted A Revolution: Black Radical Women 1965-85 with guest photographer Noelle Théard

​Everyone

Nick Cave’s glass mosaics in his installation, Every one, at the 42nd St shuttle in New York capture motions of  his “Soundsuits”.   Colorful  “figures on the wall are depicted leaping and twirling in mosaic Soundsuits”—Cave’s full body costumes that make noise when they move. “ ​​It’s almost like looking at a film strip,” Cave said. “As you’re moving down that from left to right, you see it in motion.” MTA New York, 42nd St Subway Connector.  Permanent installation

Nick Cave

New Orleans, LA

Black Orpheus: Jacob Lawrence and the Mbari Club

Black Orpheus: Jacob Lawrence and the Mbari Club explores connections between African American artist Jacob Lawrence and his contemporaries based in the Global South through the Nigerian journal Black Orpheus. The exhibit  features over 125 objects, including Lawrence’s little-known 1964–65 Nigeria series and also presents the work William H. Johnson, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Uche Okeke, Malangantana Ngwenya, Jacob Afolabi, Colette Oluwabamise Omogbai, Francis Newton Souza, Twins Seven-Seven, Wilson Tibério, Genaro de Carvalho, Agnaldo Manoel dos Santos, Susanne Wenger, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Demas Nwoko, and Avinash Chandra, among others. New Orleans Museum of Art February 10–May 7, 2023.  Then at Toledo Museum of Art June 3–September 3, 2023

Jacob Lawrence

Philadelphia, PA

Sit A Spell at The Colored Girls Museum

With the understanding that Black girlhood is often fraught with societal hardships that can interfere with health and well-being, Sit A Spell features the work of six Black women artists who were paired with African American girls between the ages of 10 and 18. Their resulting  portraits simultaneously evoke “movement and rest, contemplation and action.” The exhibition reminds us that while stillness and motion initially seem to be at odds, they actually sustain each other. 4613 Newhall St, Philadelphia, PA 19144. Ongoing

​San Francisco, California

SECA Award Exhibit at Museum of Modern Art

This year’s exhibition for the Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art Art Award  features Binta Ayofemi who honors a BIPOC presence via various mediums involving space, sound and materials, and Gregory Rick, who creates large-scale, vivid paintings depicting conflict and struggle using high-contrast imagery. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 151 Third St San Francisco, CA 94103. Runs through May 29, 2023.

Binta Ayofemi

Richmond, VA

Isaac Julien: Lessons of the Hour—Frederick Douglass 

Lessons of the Hour—Frederick Douglass is an immersive, poetic exhibition surrounding the great 19th-century abolitionist. In this resonating art experience of enthralling visuals and sound, internationally renowned London-born artist and filmmaker Sir Isaac Julien brings the integral historical figure to focus for all. 200 N. Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Arthur Ashe Boulevard Richmond, VA 23220. Runs through July 9, 2023.

Isaac Julien, 2017, courtesy of the Barnes Foundation. Photo credit: Thierry Bal.

​Washington, DC

​“Reckoning: Protest. Defiance. Resilience.”

 Reckoning: Protest. Defiance. Resilience explores the Black Lives Matter Movement, social protests and the struggle for equality.  Amy Sherald’s portrait of Breonna Taylor in a magnificent  blue flowing gown stands regally as the sole artwork in a gallery room.  The Breona Taylor portrait, which first appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair’s September 2020 issue, is buttressed by 27 newly exhibited images and artwork by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sheila Pree Bright, Bisa Butler, Shaun Leonardo, David Hammons and more.  Bisa Butler’s, I Go To Prepare A Place For You  depicts a quilt of multiple bright-colored cotton, silk and velvet fabrics depicting Harriett Tubman seated against a dark floral background majestically gazing down at the viewer.  The exhibit offers an augmented-reality experience allowing visitors to use their mobile devices to connect the artwork with other objects and themes in the museum to create an interactive, immersive, digital experience. National Museum of African American History and Culture, 1400 Constitution Ave, NW, Washington, DC Ongoing. ​

On loan from Amy Sherald, © Amy Sherald, Breonna Taylor

Bisa Butler, Harriet Tubman

Called to Create: Black Artists of the American South

Called to Create: Black Artists of the American South features: Thornton Dial, James “Son Ford” Thomas, Lonnie Holley, Mary T. Smith, Purvis Young, and other artists in the South who worked with little recognition, often using recycled materials as their art supplies and yards, porches, or boarded-up storefronts as their galleries. This exhibit brings their works to the public as prominent focal points within the National Gallery of Art. The National Gallery of Art West Building 6th St and Constitution Ave NW.​ Runs through December 31, 2023.

International 

London, UK
​

Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South

Souls Grown Deep Like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South brings together sculpture, paintings, reliefs, drawings, and quilts, most of which will be seen in the UK and Europe for the first time. It will also feature the celebrated quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend, Alabama and the neighboring communities of Rehoboth and Alberta. Artists featured include Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Ronald Lockett, Hawkins Bolden, Bessie Harvey, Charles Williams, Mary T. Smith, Purvis Young, Mose Tolliver, Nellie Mae Rowe, Mary Lee Bendolph, Marlene Bennett Jones, Martha Jane Pettway, Loretta Pettway, and Henry and Georgia Speller.  Working in near isolation from established practices, they have created masterpieces that articulate America’s painful past – the inhuman practice of enslavement, the cruel segregationist policies of the Jim Crow era, and institutionalized racism. Souls Grown Deep Like the Rivers. Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London, W1J 0BD.  Runs  March 17, 2023 — June 18, 2023.

Thornton Dial, Stars of Everything, 2004.

Africa Fashion

Africa Fashion, the largest ever exhibition on African Fashion, takes visitors on an iconic tour of fashion from the mid-20th century to current contemporary trends. The exhibit showcases fashion through photographs, textiles, music and visual arts. Africa Fashion implores the viewer to see fashion as a global phenomenon viewed through lens that are as diverse as the African continent. Victoria & Albert Museum South Kensington, Cromwell Rd, London SW7 2RL, United Kingdom.  Runs through April 16, 2023.

Mbeuk Idourrou collection, Imane Ayissi, Autumn/Winter 2019, Paris, France. Photo: Fabrice Malard / Courtesy of Imane Ayissi

Paris, France

FAITH RINGGOLD:  BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL

Faith Ringgold is a major figure in American feminist art. This exhibition is the first to bring together, in France, a group of major works by Faith Ringgold. Her work links the rich heritage of the Harlem Renaissance to current art of young Black American artists. Through her rereadings of modern art history, she engages in a critical dialogue with the Parisian art scene of the early 20th century, particularly with Picasso and his "Demoiselles d’Avignon".  Musée National Picasso-Paris 5 rue de Thorigny 75003 Paris, France.  Runs through July 2, 2023

Faith Ringgold © DailyMail/Solo Syndication

Sharjah, United Arab Emirates

Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present

Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present will feature over 300 pieces by more than 150 artists. Curated by Hoor Al Qasimi, the exhibition draws on the work of the late Okwui Enwezor, a curator who reimagined the contemporary art space. The biennial connects the city of Sharjah to discourses touching on concepts of postcolonialism, race, and modernity, emphasizing the convergence between the past and present. Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah, UAE. Runs through June 11 2023. ​

Okwui Enwezor. Photo: Joerg Koch/Getty Images.