In the years after Emancipation, a new sound emerged among formerly enslaved African-American communities working on cotton plantations in the Deep South. An amalgamation of field hollers, church hymns, and genres popular among White communities like ragtime and folk, the melancholic music eventually became known simply as the blues, and served as a critical form of self-expression for Black Americans struggling under racial oppression and economic hardship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
New York artist Teri Gandy-Richardson told Hyperallergic that she wanted to commemorate the history of the blues by addressing its connections to slavery. Her sculptural works “Squeeze” (2008), “Stir (Seven Years)” (2009-2020), and “My Grandmother’s Crown” (2018), now on view at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning (JCAL) in Queens, all feature repurposed scraps of denim — a heavy-duty fabric historically dyed with indigo extract, historically obtained by hand by enslaved Africans.
The blues, Gandy-Richardson said, are “the legacy and expression of struggle, solidarity, and spirit responsible for the soulful lineage that sings our truth and beauty and lives at the root of all American music (and culture).”
Running until September 13, the exhibition An Afro-Latinx Mixtape is an ode to New York City’s African, Latine, and Caribbean diasporic community members and their ancestors, melding music history with visual mediums like painting, sculpture, video, drawing, and digital illustration. It’s the fourth exhibition presented through JCAL’s Visual Voices initiative promoting emerging BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) curators.
Spanning multiple genres of musical forms like jazz, reggae, and bomba, An Afro-Latinx Mixtape draws connections between global affairs and New York City. Examples include Anthony Newton’s paintings, which contextualize ’90s hip hop through the Pan-African movement; Irene Fernández’s brightly colored textual visualizations of reggaeton songs that draw on her own Puerto Rican heritage; and Edgar Moza’s acrylic renderings that explore the aftermath of the Salvadoran Civil War through cumbia.
“For me, a mixtape is just a good way to describe New York as this medley of sounds and voices and cultures,” the show’s curator, Adrian Bermeo, told Hyperallergic. A self-described “Ecuadorican” from Jackson Heights, Bermeo drew inspiration for the exhibition from his own experiences listening to hip-hop cassette tapes on a walkman and burning songs onto homemade CD mixes while growing up in the late ’90s and early 2000s. He also has work on display — a sketch of a walking trumpet titled “Walkin’ In Rhythm” (2024) that is a tribute to the American rhythm and blues group The Blackbyrds.
This drawing is displayed alongside works commemorating other Latine and African artists, like Nigerian musician Fela Aníkúlápó Kútì, whose art and activism inspired Charles Wright’s oil painting “The World Wide Web” (2024), and acclaimed Cuban singer and civil rights activist Celia Cruz, who is memorialized in a portrait by Ingrid Yuzly Mathurin. Titled “Queen of Salsa” (2024), the painting features a color palette that pays homage to Cruz’s Yoruba practices, a spiritual tradition that the artist shares in common with the late singer.
“[Cruz’s] fight for racial equality aligns with my commitment to creating art that celebrates Black and Brown cultures, particularly Caribbean culture, which is so central to my identity as a proud Haitian-American artist,” Mathurin told Hyperallergic.
Grounding itself in New York City’s unique music scene, An Afro-Latinx Mixtape spotlights local art movements like the early 20th-century Harlem Renaissance and contemporary hip-hop and street graffiti culture to illuminate the ways in which they have historically connected the Latine and African diaspora. This intimate experience of fostering community is magnified in “Home” (2023), a digital painting by Sasha Lynn Roberts that also served as the show’s cover art. Originally based on a photo, the work is a rendering of her two cousins listening to music during a car ride on Manhattan’s FDR Drive. It is paired with her favorite musical work, “My Song” by British singer-songwriter Labi Siffre.
The song, Roberts said, represents “a sense of unapologetic belonging: feeling self-actualized and grounded, despite feeling like there are people, systems and narratives that seek to destroy your self confidence.”
“I think a beautiful part of Black culture is the ability to see yourself reflected in the reality of so many others,” Roberts continued. “It feels special and precious, but also a vessel for connection.”
