Playing with the Exquisite (Corpse)

“[S]urrealism” wrote Robin D. G. Kelley some two decades years ago, “is not an aesthetic doctrine but an international revolutionary movement concerned with the emancipation of thought.”1 Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists since 1940 opened at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in summer 2024. A spectacular exhibition that included more than fifty artists, it defined its own visual language across an extensive array of works of art. Programming from early May through the end of July also activated the museum space, ensuring visitors would return multiple times to experience the exhibition in different ways. Surrealism and Us featured primarily black artists who either identified themselves as surrealists or whose artwork is in conversation with the vast symbolism of the Surrealist movement, such as representations of death, the body, the dreamworld, the subconscious, the marvelous and the absurd. The “Us” in the exhibition title seemed to not only refer to black people, as in Suzanne Cesaire’s 1943 essay from which it draws its name, but captured the way that the art work invited viewers into alternate realities. What became visible throughout were the numerous transnational lines of connection between 20th and 21st century surrealist artists and writers included in the exhibition, whose work was part of a cultural resistance to emergent fascism worldwide.

Surrealism and Us not only expanded viewers imaginations about the possibilities within African diasporic art but it reminded us of the cycles of struggle that are part of this life. According to María Elena Ortiz, the exhibition’s sole curator, surrealism can help us understand the moment that we are currently living through. In the introduction to the exhibition catalogue she writes “the conditions of black life in Caribbean and America, have become ever more viscerally surreal.”2 Furthermore, she notes, “We see everywhere the long shadow of histories of colonial domination.”3 Although Ortiz had wanted to create this exhibition for at least a decade, in an era in which social media brings a global awareness of the daily horrors of present-day settler-colonialism in real time, Surrealism and Us seemed to show up right on time. Awe-inspiring artistic interpretations of past, present, and parallel realities resonated today. Within the framework of more than a century of surrealist thinking, Surrealism and Us located itself with a particular eye towards the wisdom of Caribbean artists, who were well represented in the exhibition. Inspired by the critical theory of Martinican writer Cesaire, who saw surrealism as an exceptional “method of inquiry” that was inherently liberatory, the exhibition included many works by artists of Haitian, Cuban, Bajan and Dominican descent.4 An extensive and a detailed timeline and photographic archive complemented the exhibition, outlining surrealist artists’ migrations to and from New York City in the early twentieth century, conveying how ideas had circulated between the metropoles of Paris and Harlem through a globalized network of black intellectuals.5

The exhibition flowed nicely across the second floor of the Tadao Ando-designed Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth. Brightly-colored Haitian drapo Vodou, or beaded vodou flags, by Myrlande Constant hung overhead and waved us into the entryway at the top of stairs. Jazmine Thomas-Girvan’s “Inside the Labrinth” 2021, greeted visitors: under glass, a delicate labyrinth in which stands a small birdlike creature fashioned from metal. When leaning in for a closer look, however, one is both pulled in and repelled by the animal-object’s grotesqueness. Many works in this exhibition give this effect, but on the other side of that initial terror there seems room for delight: a foregrounding of imagination with an underlying bit of fear or surprise—something long celebrated by the Surrealists. Full of creatures and unspoken longings, Surrealism and Us allowed for lingering interactions with works that tugged on us and repeatedly pulled us into uncomfortable interactions. Leaning in at times felt like walking up close to the soft and vulnerable underbelly of a beast, wondering what we would truly find there: obscured by fur, and other textures, a teat exposed and we dare reach out to touch it. 6 One could nevertheless connect with the many bodily forms included in the exhibition that are distorted, and dis-remembered—or existing under the cover of dark green vegetation. As one walked past Zak Ové’s “La Jablesse,” 2013, for example, one felt like the one being watched. The mixed media three-dimensional sculpture of a two-faced Janis figure stands just a bit taller than the viewer, almost floating in the space, with legs of wood like stilts or contorted calf’s legs. It is wrapped with rope and twine as if a talisman in its own right. A few steps away, Ja’Tovia Gary’s piece “Citational Ethics (Zora Neal Hurston, 1943),” 2023, centering a vanity crafted out of red neon, glowed so brightly it warmed the space though visitors squinted as they walked past.

Art works in Surrealism and Us consistently met one another across time and space, making for exciting explorations: wandering from a photographs of hieroglyphs by Ana Mendiata to a desire-filled poem by Toni Morrison and Kara Walker’s projected antebellum shadows; at some point one ends up in a passageway flanked by the blues and blacks of the night sky wrapped around the haunting portraits-as-altars that comprise Eliot and Erick Jimenez’s “Blue Chapel”.7 Elsewhere, a striking portrait by April Bey titled, “I will Never Ask ANY OF YOU for Respect, I will Demand it,” 2023, composed with pieced together fabric in bright patterns and gold. The stitching stands out around the corpulent dark-skinned black woman at its center; clad in futuristic gear and framed by tropical vegetation she turns to lock eyes with you. Perhaps only the Simone Leigh sculpture felt cramped inside the wide museum halls, since it obstructed an obvious route. Meanwhile, a sea of Allora & Calzadilla’s unsettlingly realistic flowers made of polyvinyl chloride had parted in a pathway. Yet Leigh’s abstract sculpture of a black woman complemented Kim Dacres’ bust titled “Harriet,” echoing its elevated ridges. Even though she had painted with a shiny new layer of black over the strips of automotive tire that she had used to symbolize familiar spaces in her community, the sculpture still evoked an absent scent of burning rubber.

Resonances between artworks throughout seemed to reflect how carefully Ortiz had considered which Surrealists and their work might be “invited to the dinner party”, those who one would love to imagine sitting together in conversation. On a wall near the gallery entrance hung a piece that effectively archived a visual conversation among Surrealist artists. The collaborative drawing on brown paper by Ted Joans, Agustin Cardenas, Wilfredo Lam, Joyce Mansour, Roberto Matta, and Hervé Télémaque was produced during a game of “Exquisite Corpse” and captured the level of play involved in this exhibition. Exquisite corpse is a drawing game that was played by surrealists since the 1920s, in which each participant adds to a drawing of a body on a piece of paper that has been folded into segments. It is passes on to the next person to contribute with only the connecting lines visible. The game, invented by André Breton, known as one of the founders of Surrealism, reflects the kind of free association that Surrealist artists were engaging with; riffing on one another, they produced these collaborative visual compositions. In this example, read from top to bottom, the first line drawing by Joans is of two wild dogs looking toward the opening of a vagina. By the time we reach the bottom of this series of free association drawings—in which lines connect swirling lines that are recognizable as animals and human body parts—we land at a winding illustration of penises.8

Elsewhere in the exhibition, the work of Tomás Esson, “Retreat #29” appears like a game of exquisite corpse come to life: a painting of a stack of flesh-colored body parts freshly reorganized. Although we know the body in new ways at this moment, as social media brings renewed visual proximity dismemberment, Esson’s bright colors and the cartoonish pattern on the wall where it is hung make it oddly absurd. Not far away, Wangechi Mutu’s “Histology of the different Classes of Uterine Tumors,” 2006, joins this same conversation as a series of collage portraits made from repurposed medical and magazine images. Just behind that wall Arthur Jaffa’s video montage “Love is the Message, The Message is Death” does its own form of suturing, but this time of footage of police violence that plays on loop; a backlit print of a wide-eyed figure by Cuban artist Belkys Ayon stares us down at the end of the corridor as audio trickles out of the viewing room.

Kenny Rivero’s “Olafs and Chanclas,” 2021, hangs imposingly in a wide central gallery, protecting us from “mal de ojo” with its Hand of Fatima covered in rings. Rivero has layered on gesso in ways that makes some of the rings looping the large brown fingers to protrude just slightly from the canvas. Rivero’s work—a gathering symbols—becomes an altar in its own right. The two children also depicted in the work are hiding under white sheets like ghosts but reveal their basketball shorts, the ones sold at the bodegas in New York City; each different chancla their feet represents a different family member, like a spirit evoked. In an especially dynamic conversation with Rivero at the May 18th symposium, Ashley Stull Meyers offered a way of understanding this and others of his works as play that becomes ritual. The conversation gave further context for the “echoes” and “eulogies” visible in Rivero’s work. When asked to decode for viewers, Rivero pointed to a pattern of flooring he has “sampled” from painting Kerry James Marshall’s “De Style” as both a sign of respect and a code. According to Rivero, often what presented itself on the canvas was a result of channeling what needed to emerge. Thomas-Girvan also described her work as channeling: “the materials speak to me,” said the artist, who had been trained as jeweler, to the symposium audience. She had sought answers through the material itself, often working with objects that carried a “divine energy”; ritual that, she said, connected her to the work of her ancestors. Indeed, Surrealism and US connected us. Fittingly, a keynote by Cole Arthur Riley called on us to look inward, while a ring shout performance curated by artist Rashida Bumbray closed out the symposium, by elevating the vibration and connecting us to one another.

Through a diversity of media and form, artists included in Surrealism and Us embraced notions of futurity, fugitivity and black imagination and demonstrated a legacy of interconnected struggle for liberation. Surrealism as a politic and aesthetic form allows us to witness “dream-states with implications for the waking world.”9 As colonial violence continues to look us in the dead in the eye, Surrealism and Us reminded visitors of what it means to practice world-making when one cannot awaken from a dream-state that has turned a nightmare. The exhibition allowed us to appreciate how through play and imagination it is possible to hold onto wonder amidst grief.