ACROSS THE DIASPORA: PORTALS TO ANCESTRAL MEMORY AND SPECULATIVE FUTURES

by Beverly Aarons

On view at ARTE NOIR Gallery until November 23, 2025, Across The Diaspora is a non-linear, narrative-driven exhibition that centers the voices of African descendants in the Diaspora. Part ancestral memory, part fantastical future, the works of thirteen artists serve as cultural portals—resisting assimilation, reimagining tradition, and daring to dream surreal futures.

The exhibition unfolds in a spiral, one section leading to the next, all radiating from a cluster of traditional African masks perched on pedestals. The arrangement resembles the Yowa cross — the Kongo cosmogram, a circle divided into four points marking birth, life, death, and ancestral rebirth. It becomes a fitting metaphor for the African Diaspora’s journey: a violent rupture caused by colonialism and chattel slavery, an unbroken connection to the ancestral realm, and the ultimate metamorphosis — transforming pain into light.

A traditional African mask flanked by works by Najee Tobin (L) and Bonnie Hopper (R).

In Tasanee Durrett’s Tides of Liberation, raffia strands cascade from the canvas like a veil of memory—natural and untamed, familiar yet recontextualized. Raffia, a fibrous material harvested from the raffia palm, has been used for centuries across the African continent to create rope, baskets, ceremonial garments, building materials, and ritual masks. In Durrett’s hands, it becomes more than material—it becomes metaphor. Just as raffia has long been used in African ceremonies to conceal identity and invoke spiritual transformation, Tides of Liberation uses it to veil a deeper purpose: the celebration of Captain William T. Shorey, a Black whaler who secretly ferried enslaved Africans to freedom, even as he mastered the sea to sustain his own survival.

ARTE NOIR Gallery Manager Hasaan Kirkland and a guest chat in front of Tasanee Durrett's Tides of Liberation at the exhibit's opening reception.

The use of materials that have spiritual significance in many African cosmologies continues in Gyambibi Akwasi’s Flower Girl, where wood and fire—elements long associated with ancestral memory, transformation, and ritual power—are harnessed not only to render form, but to inscribe Black life into a living, breathing surface that refuses erasure. Flower Girl is a technically masterful mixed-media painting that combines pyrography (wood burning) and paint to hand-build an image that is both vibrant and intricately textured, capturing surface details—like the sheen of skin and the softness of hair—that would be impossible to achieve in other mediums.

Bonnie Hopper’s Mavis in Wonderland explores a whimsical and compelling reimagining of the protagonist in Alice in Wonderland as a young Black girl—round afro, arms crossed, set against a vibrant blue background, wearing the Mad Hatter’s 10/6 hat. This oil collage on yupo paper features the rabbit/hare, symbolizing the trickster archetype in many African American and West African storytelling traditions (e.g., Wolof and Akan)—evidence that meaningful ontological artifacts made their way across the Atlantic and resisted erasure. But I would press further and say that Mavis represents the specific experiences of enslaved Africans who stepped through the door of no return into a confusing world of chaos, nonsensical rules, and cruel violence. She emerges confident and triumphant, wearing the Mad Hatter’s hat—no longer asleep, but completely aware of her own power.

Epiphany, by B. Curtis Grayson III, leans into the power of African abstract expressionism—a thick Black line swerves and spirals through the complex and layered painting, connecting a cornucopia of African patterns set against bird nest paper and adorned by what appears to be blocks of white beads. This sinuous Black line evokes the image of the helix, a term some artists and scholars use to describe the coiled structure of afro-textured hair, connecting it metaphorically to DNA, ancestry, and sacred geometry. The line becomes a powerful symbol of African lineage, threading disparate fragments of culture, memory, and identity into a unified whole.

Epiphany by B. Curtis Grayson III, on display in the gallery.

In Rubin Quarcoopome’s every curl a miracle, every strand a wonder, a massive afro fills the upper frame—bigger than life, textured and luminous. Before it stands a lone figure, small in comparison, his head bowed in reverence, hands clasped behind his bare back. The artist challenges the viewer’s perceptions and cultural assumptions. The afro—so often maligned as unruly or unprofessional—is exalted instead. Quarcoopome inverts the hierarchy, presenting the afro as a site of reverence, awe, and sacred magnitude. Warm lighting gives the hair a topographical quality, as if its terrain could be mapped strand by strand. The surreal contrast in scale between the figure and the hair pushes the photograph beyond portraiture, transforming it into an icon of wonder.

In Mohamed Gabriel’s intimate photograph of a Sudanese Jertik ceremony, tradition is not merely depicted—it is embodied. The tightly cropped frame centers the bride’s hands, adorned with delicate henna, layered gold jewelry, red tassels, and the rich textures of ceremonial fabric. There are no faces or bridal spectators in the background—only gesture, adornment, and presence. This compositional choice shifts the viewer’s focus away from spectacle and toward embodied inheritance. The bride is not abstracted into an anonymous symbol; she is rendered specific through material culture—through rings passed down, henna inscribed by hand, tassels dyed in ancestral reds. The photograph captures a liminal moment: between girlhood and womanhood, past and future, self and collective memory. This is not the hypervisibility of the Western bridal gaze; it is the intimacy of a world that knows its own sacred rites. By centering the photograph on hands—soft, steady, adorned—Gabriel honors the gesture as archive, as portal, as promise.

Across The Diaspora isn’t simply a showcase of diasporic aesthetics—it is a declaration of presence. In addition to the artists featured earlier, the exhibition includes powerful works by Conya Gilmore, Vandorn Hinnant, Mel Isidor, Narus Jefferson (N. Carlos J.), Symonne Larison-Jones, Desmond McFarlane, and Najee Tobin. While the works span a wide range of mediums and visual vocabularies, what binds them together is a refusal to be flattened into symbols of trauma or nostalgia. Instead, they inhabit a world of portals, surrealism, and non-linear memory. There is no single narrative here—only a constellation of lived experiences, spiritual lineages, and speculative imaginings. Many of the works demand physical presence to fully experience the textures, shadows, etched details, and layered surfaces that are impossible to capture in a photograph. This materiality matters. It reminds us that Black diasporic creativity is not merely visual but sensory, spiritual, and embodied. Even the most abstract or surreal compositions feel anchored in something older and deeper that resists easy consumption but requires layered interpretation. Across The Diaspora explores African identity as not a memory to be recovered but a force to be continually reimagined—boldly, beautifully, and on its own terms.

On view through November 23, 2025, at ARTE NOIR, Across The Diaspora features works by Tasanee Durrett, Mohamed Gabriel, Conya Gilmore, B. Curtis Grayson III, Akwasi Gyambibi, Vandorn Hinnant, Bonnie Hopper, Mel Isidor, Narus Jefferson (N. Carlos J.), Symonne Larison‑Jones, Desmond McFarlane, Najee Tobin, and Rubin Quarcoopome.

Hasaan Kirkland, Jazmyn Scott, Mel Isidor, B. Curtis Grayson III, Rubin Quarcoopome, and Mohamed Gabriel at the opening reception.