A mirrored map showing North America attached to Africa instead of South America welcomes visitors to the National Gallery of Art’s (NGA) newest exhibition, “Afro-Atlantic Histories.” Created by Hank Willis Thomas, the 2020 artwork—titled A Place to Call Home (African American Reflection)—testifies to the “feelings of connection and detachment that many African Americans have toward Africa,” notes the NGA in a statement. Looking at oneself in the artwork’s reflective surface allows viewers to stake their position in the historical and contemporary racial narratives of the United States.
“[A] mythical connection to Africa is embedded in your identity, but many people go to Africa looking for home and don’t find it because our roots are so diluted there,” says Thomas in the statement. “They also never felt at home in the U.S., where they were born. I wanted to make a place where African Americans come from.”
Thomas’ map is one of more than 130 artworks and documents featured in the Washington, D.C. exhibition, which explores the impact of the African diaspora in Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean and Europe between the 17th and 21st centuries. Broadly defined as the mass dispersion of peoples from Africa, often through forced migration under the transatlantic slave trade, the diaspora has a rich cultural legacy, with diasporic art expressing Blackness in disparate places across the Atlantic.
First exhibited at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) in Brazil in 2018, “Historias Afro-Atlanticas,” as the show was called then, explored the Portuguese word histórias, which “can encompass both fictional and non-fictional narratives of cultural, economic, personal or political character,” according to 2021 NGA statement. “The term is plural, diverse and inclusive, presenting viewpoints that have been marginalized or forgotten.”
Like its original iteration, “Afro-Atlantic Histories” argues that multiple histories are at play at any given time—a view that has become increasingly mainstream in recent decades. Though every society has a widely accepted history, alternative narratives omitted from the history books also exist. Some survive through oral traditions, while others are siloed in the communities that experienced them.
“We [have started to] understand history differently in the past 40 or 50 years,” says Molly Donovan, curator of contemporary art at the NGA. “We’re working in different ways to tell histories. It enables us to tell better stories.”
