Curator Raul Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet
Sensorial Africana Superrealities: Five Diaspora Contemporary Artists
November 4 – November 26, 2023

Weaving symbolic, poetic, political, and socio-cultural references, Sensorial Africana Superrealities displays visual and material languages reaching locations such as North Carolina, Maryland, Cuba, Nigeria, England, and Washington, D.C. This exhibition interconnects African ancestral paths and realities that historically have emerged in transnational Black Atlantic and Caribbean territories. Employing personal histories, communal experiences, and territorial cartographies, the artists reveal how critical African-based knowledge still shapes today’s interdisciplinary cultural expressions. Mapping imagined sensorial crossroads to project their reverse memories and complex histories, the artists engage in intercultural dialogue to express how, converging at Howard University, they continue the legacy of this iconic center of Black culture. Artists included in Sensorial Africana Superrealities are Elka Stevens, Akili Ron Anderson, Reginald Pointer, Raimi Gbadamosi, and Raul Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet.

About the Curator:

Aiming to transform the perception of African Diaspora sensorial realities during the present national crises, artists search for their ancestral legacies as they shift their locus of enunciation and social preoccupations toward a more inclusive territory. The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to control women’s bodies overlaps with many communities’ risks—political violence, racial injustice, voter suppression. Civil rights gained throughout the 1954-1968 nonviolent social movements and Black Lives Matter public demonstrations are at the brink of disappearance. Africana Sensorial Superrealities presents works by five global African descendant artists whose creative productions examine diverse ways in which space, color patterns, lines, graphic writing, statehood, textual construction, and ancestral memories are perceived and represented across the diaspora territories. Weaving Africana-diasporic cultural languages and their undercurrent connectivity, Africana Sensorial Superrealities provides multiple visions in today’s global artistic and sociopolitical discourses.