Cartographies of Displacement, the work of Puerto Rican artists at Miami Art Week

Opa-locka, FL—Ten North Group is pleased to announce Art of Transformation: AFRICA GLOBAL, the 2023 conceptual framework exhibiting the diversity of African Diasporic communities and their varied experiences, taking place during Art Basel Miami Beach 2023 and Miami Art Week 2023. This annual program is designed to explore issues in African and African Diaspora contemporary art and brings artists of African descent from around the world to Miami in a series of exhibitions, panel discussions, performances and film screenings. Ten North Group presents AFRICA GLOBAL in Opa-locka, FL, from December 3 through December 10, 2023.

The arts festival in the architecturally distinct city of Opa-locka will offer six exhibitions, including works from Puerto Rican artists, a sculpture pavilion, a book installation resisting the erasure of Black literature, and works from Ten North Group’s extensive collection of art from Africa, the Caribbean, and the Diaspora. Programming events include “Landscape Noir,” a conversation on how the arts can be used as a catalyst to transform previously forgotten communities (Dec. 4); A “Performance & Voguing Workshop” with Afro-Caribbean artist Edrimael Delgado Reyes (Dec. 8); an Afro-Cuban dance performance by the Ife-Ile Dance Company (Dec. 3); and the headline event featuring a panel discussion led by curator Tumelo Mosaka, followed by a film screening by artist Marrero Sanchez on grief, identity, colonialism and gender (Dec. 9).

Photo: Abdiel D. Segarra Ríos/ Facebook

“We are thrilled to announce our participation in this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach,” says Dr. Willie Logan, the President and CEO of Ten North Group. “Art of Transformation strengthens our commitment to catalyze meaningful dialogue within our community and globally while establishing our City as a world-class destination to experience art of the African Diaspora. Our goal is to inspire, empower, and educate South Florida’s diverse communities and to expose our visitors to the exceptional artistic talent that exists in Africa and the African Diaspora.”

Cartographies of Displacement / Cartografías del Desplazamiento (on view Dec. 6 – 10)
Curators: Helen Ceballos & Abdiel D. Segarra Ríos (Puerto Rico)
Location: The Pavilion, 650 Ali Baba Ave., Opa-locka, FL 33054

‘Cartographies of Displacement’ brings together the work of Puerto Rican artists who, through their respective practices, reflect on what is produced in the junctures that displacement provokes. The exhibition comments on the experiences that accumulate in the everyday – the ways in which we live and negotiate with the forces that displace us, the changes that undergo the landscape – politically and infrastructurally inside and outside the city – and the ways in which we conceive geography within the archipelago and in the diaspora, physically and temporally. Alongside these observations on the setting, the curatorial work reflects on the production of subjectivities and the questioning of hegemonic identities – individual and collective – and on how this has repercussions on the articulation of historical narratives and the right to remember.

Artists: Ricardo Alcaráz Díaz, Nayda Collazo Lloréns, Brenda Cruz, Tony Cruz Pabón, Ada del Pilar, Edrimael Delgado Reyes, Javier Orfon, Glorimar Marrero, Rafael J. Miranda, Mickey Negrón, André Marcel Pagán, Marisol Plard Narváez, Guillermo Rodríguez, Estefanía Rivera Cortés, Noemí Segarra, Awilda Sterling Duprey y José Luis Vargas

As knowledge produced by African and African Diaspora intellectuals and artists is being debated, legislated, and litigated, Required Reading calls for a return to memory land where what “they” ban becomes required. This Art in Public Places exhibition appropriates a plurality of works by African and African Diaspora writers and artists as a reflection of polyvocality and decentering of knowledge in a time of a legislative construction of ignorance and new cartographies of power and exclusion.