It’s unexpected to visit Fitchburg, about 50 miles from Boston, with a very large Spanish-speaking population, and within its art museum, experiencing a seven-artist exhibition that explores and presents varied views of Africa.
Fitchburg Art Museum’s (FAM) partnership with artist collective Where Are All The Black People At (WAATBPA) has opened “Dialogues, Diasporas, and Detours Through Africa,” featuring the work of seven artists, curated by multi-disciplinary artist Dell Marie Hamilton with FAM curator Lauren Szumita.
These artists in residence mark FAM’s inaugural Black Artist Residency. Through deep engagement with African art in the museum’s permanent collection, they created new bodies of work inspired by centuries of long-standing discourse between Africa and the United States. Artists each chose an African artwork from the collection as a starting point and through varied disciplines, created this original and insightful exploration into the complexities of African heritage and its aesthetic impact.
“Dialogues, Diasporas, and Detours through Africa,” explained Fitchburg Art Museum Director Nick Capasso, “is the result of many conversations between the Fitchburg Art Museum and Where Are All The Black People At (WAATBPA), about the long history of unsatisfactory and discriminatory relations between art museums and Black artists in our region. To support the mission of WAATBPA, we co-created a soft residency program, in which seven artists of different generations (chosen by WAATBPA) were given special access to FAM’s permanent collection, and curators, to create new artworks inspired by objects from the past, and to create a group exhibition.
“An essential part of our mission,” Capasso continued, “is our commitment to exhibiting the work of contemporary artists in New England. FAM has a robust history of exhibiting and collecting work by Latino/an artists. Latino communities currently comprise 40 percent of Fitchburg’s population, many of whom identify as Afro-Latino.”
(To read more, pick up a copy of our latest issue! Find a pick-up location near you or Subscribe Here.)