Inspired by a remarkable 1940s essay, the group exhibition Surrealism and Us examines Afrosurrealist tools for battling fascism, colonialism, and cultural assimilation.
Surrealism and Us
March 10–July 28, 2024
The Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth
In the 1943 essay “Surrealism and Us” from the cultural journal Tropiques, Martinique-born activist and writer Suzanne Césaire called for a Caribbean brand of Surrealism that would revolutionize Black art and society. With its capacity to reveal the unconscious, Césaire believed Surrealism “will aid in liberating people by illuminating the blind myths that have led them to this point.” She viewed Surrealism as an antidote to the malice of fascism and colonialism, as a tool for standing against cultural assimilation.
In the groundbreaking exhibition Surrealism and Us at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the institution’s curator María Elena Ortiz pays homage to Césaire’s essay. The show challenges traditional definitions of Surrealism beyond the European avant-garde by exploring more than eighty artworks made by Caribbean and Black artists from the 1940s to the present.
Ortiz acknowledges that not all artists in the exhibition may explicitly label their work as Surrealist. But she argues that they have wrested away the tools of Surrealism to explore their relationship with the African diaspora, a worldwide collection of communities in the Americas and the Caribbean descended from African-born people.
Throughout the exhibition, artists hijack the familiar, reference dreams and the unconscious mind, or play with Surrealist traditions such as collage.
Throughout the exhibition, artists hijack the familiar, reference dreams and the unconscious mind, or play with Surrealist traditions such as collage, as seen in the mixed-media print series by Kenyan-born artist Wangechi Mutu, Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors (2006). Mutu centers the female body to examine themes of race, colonialism, and violence, particularly against Black women. The artist’s collages of magazine clippings overlaid on 19th-century medical drawings of diseased female sexual organs result in a surrealistic combination of the beautiful and the bizarre.
This synthesis of the nonsensical with reflections on Black identity and history permeates the exhibition, emboldening viewers to recognize absurdities of the Black experience in oppressive systems, both past and present, themes often central to Afrosurrealism. For instance, American artist Kara Walker’s installation Darkytown Rebellion (2001) uses uncanny manipulation of silhouettes and caricature forms from the 19th century with a projection of overlapping colors to create a funhouse-like effect and distort our perception of imagined life in the Antebellum South.
Some artists subvert the accepted Euro-centric norms by changing the details of a story, as seen in Myrlande Constant’s three artworks hanging near the entrance of the exhibition. The Haitian textile artist specializes in Vodou-themed flags. In Rasanbleman soupe tout eskót yo (All the Escorts Gathering for Supper) (2019), Constant re-envisions the conventional Christian story of the Last Supper with new visual imagery: a Black man’s face towering over a table surrounded by a large group of people with various skin tones (a reference to Haiti’s racial diversity) set against a tropical background. I can clearly see how the artist blends traditional Western constructs with elements of Afrodiasporic spirituality.
As someone more familiar with the European traditions of Surrealism, I was intrigued by how contemporary artists have adopted elements of this early-20th-century practice to spark conversations about the lived experience of Black and Brown folk today.
Césaire’s call for a new brand of Surrealism continues to inspire artistic production. As cultural critic Lanre Bakare demonstrates in a 2018 article for The Guardian, Afrosurrealism has even found its way into pop culture, as seen in Donald Glover’s television show Atlanta (2016-22), Jordan Peele’s film Get Out (2017), Boots Riley’s film Sorry to Bother You (2018), as well as music videos by artists like Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar. Bakare can’t help but wonder if the Afrosurrealist revival happening now and “escaping into the strange and fantastical is simply a natural response to living in a world bound by structural racism.”
For these cultural icons, much like the artists featured in the Modern’s exhibition, Surrealism provides a means of examining facets of Black culture, warping perception to point out the illogical, nonsensical, and fantastical experiences of their everyday realities.
In light of these contemporary cultural dialogues, Surrealism and Us is a robust addition, further expanding the discourse of art history beyond the traditional lens of white, Western European creatives. The Modern in Fort Worth gives voice to artists who have long been grappling with and questioning the systems that demand assimilation, and provides visitors with new ways of seeing, thinking, and liberating themselves.
