‘Conversations about joy’: Opa-locka art exhibits share the ‘positive’ Black experience
Photographer Johanne Rahaman loves to capture Black people doing everyday things with her camera.
An older woman standing with a rollator. A young couple during Black Beach week.
In her series And Is: The Black Florida Project, curated by her friend and Sugarcane Magazine founder Melissa Hunter Davis, you can see how much she revels in the mundane, focusing on the small things that make people beautiful.
“I was impressed with her attention to Black communities that aren’t always featured when you have conversations about joy,” Davis told the Miami Herald. “Often people come to those communities for poverty porn or what they think is any type of urban blight.”
Rahaman’s work is one of several exhibits that will be featured during Ten North Group’s the Art of Transformation in Opa-locka during Miami Art Week. This year’s theme, Black Aliveness and the Aesthetics of Being, is inspired from author Kevin Quashie’s book “Black Aliveness, Or A Poetics of Being.” The book “imagines a Black world in which one encounters Black being as it is rather than only as it exists in the shadow of anti-Black violence.”
“It’s really about looking at the black experience in African diaspora culture, and looking at it from something in a positive framework,” Willie Logan, President and CEO of Ten North Group which hosts the annual event, told the Miami Herald. He said Ten North’s event has worked to combine the arts and literature to reframe the negative way people in the African Diaspora have been perceived. “It’s about reshaping knowledge [and] about having people to see people in different ways.”
The city of Opa-locka hosts its Art of Transformation in an effort to make Black art accessible to the communities that it comes from. “Our show is really for and about the community. It’s free, and it is very focused on the diaspora, and it’s within a community where people already are,” Logan said, residents don’t have to worry about spending time in traffic to commute to their exhibits or having to worry about spending a lot of money to see art in their neighborhood. Festivities kick off Wednesday evening with an opening reception at the ARC and continue through Sunday with all exhibits open.
The event will feature six art exhibits, including Rahaman’s, which Davis said depicts Black life in Florida from Liberty City and Brownville in Miami to as far north as Eatonville. “You see a little bit of Black love, you see Black tenderness expressed amongst Black men, which is not something that you always see,” Davis said of what visitors can expect during the exhibit. “You see a little bit of everything – people who live in these areas and still have who can still find peace in their day. And that’s not often how we describe Black communities.”
Another exhibit, Jamaica on My Mind: Aliveness and Livity, looks at Jamaican culture within the island and from the diaspora point of view. Curated by Phillip Thomas, the exhibit features 18 artists, including Bryan McFarlane, Greg Bailey, Kimani Beckford, and K. Khalfani Ra. Thomas said the exhibition includes artists who’ve been “on the ground floor of creating the architecture of what we call Jamaican art history” along with more contemporary generations.
“It takes into consideration different perspectives of Jamaican culture at different points of view. That’s how I’ve decided to look at the culture in a more broad and holistic way,” Thomas told the Miami Herald.
Thomas, who is also holding a panel discussion called Jamaica on My Mind which aims to discuss Jamaican contemporary art in a political, social, and economic context, said he hopes the exhibit “creates the kind of energy and the kind of vibrancy that allows community to function and to see themselves.”
Visitors to the Art of Transformation can also take a historical tour of the city that also highlights its Black history. The Tales of Opa-locka Heritage Journey tells visitors 13 different stories, explaining the city’s Moorish architecture, its role in the military and its first Black employee, Ernest Ingram, who was hired in 1927, a year after Opa-locka became a city.
The tour also allows visitors a chance to hear oral narratives from people of Opa-locka, said Alex Van Mel, a consultant with Ten North Group. “I really wanted this to have a level of immersion that gets you to just frame Opa-locka in a completely different way,”
IF YOU GO:
WHAT: The Art of Transformation
WHEN: Dec. 4-8
WHERE: The ARC – 675 Ali Baba Ave., Opa-locka; Jamaica On My Mind Pavilion — 650 Ali Baba Ave., Opa-locka; The Historic Opa-locka Train Station – 490 Ali Baba Ave., Opa-locka; The Hurt Building – 490 Opa-locka Blvd., Opa-locka
PRICE: Free
