Visionary Aponte Symposium and Panel Discussion

Saturday, January 13th from 2-6pm The Haitian Cultural Arts Alliance cordially invites you to the José Antonio Aponte Symposium and Panel Discussion for Visionary Aponte: Art and Black Freedom at the Little Haiti Cultural Complex. The exhibition features artists José Bedia, Leonardo Benzant, Sanford Biggers, Juan Roberto Diago, Edouard Duval Carrié, Alexis Esquivel, Teresita Fernández, Fabiola Jean-Louis, Nina Angela Mercer, Clara Morera, Glexis Novoa, Marielle Plaisir, Asser Saint-Val, Jean-Marcel St. Jacques, and Renée Stout.

Curated by Édouard Duval Carrié, Artistic Director, HCAA and the Global/Borderless Caribbean Series, Tosha Grantham, the Coordinating Curator, Visionary Aponte: Art and Black Freedom, and Marie Vickles, Curator-in-Residence Little Haiti Cultural Complex; with Ada Ferrer, Ph.D., New York University, Linda Rodriguez, Ph.D., New York University, and Laurent Dubois, Ph.D., Duke University.

Visionary Aponte: Art and Black Freedom is a two part exhibition that features historical material and works by fifteen contemporary artists who respond to José Antonio Aponte’s lost Book of Paintings. Aponte, a Cuban freedom fighter, executed in Havana in 1812, was forced to describe each of its pictures during his trial. To spark new awareness of Aponte’s complex life and art, each artist evokes Aponte’s trial testimony in new work – paintings, drawings, sculpture, video, mixed media and textiles – that engages how Aponte’s portrayals of an array of subjects – Biblical scenes, landscapes and episodes in the history of Africa, Europe and the Americas. The exhibition is on view through January 20, 2018.