2026 Theme

An AfriKin exhibition curated by Joseph L. Underwood, Ph.D.

GRIOT: Urgent Storytelling
for Our Times

We invite artists of African heritage to submit proposals for a landmark exhibition celebrating the creative traditions of testimony, defiance, and endurance. GRIOT centers creative tradition as an act of survival, witness, and transformation. Drawing on the West African griot/griotte—the men and women who served as keepers of history, truth-tellers, sometimes celebrating achievements, and sometimes issuing warnings—this exhibition positions contemporary artists as inheritors of that lineage: those who remember, those who name, and those who imagine otherwise.

"This is not an exhibition of archaic pasts — it is a powerful, living archive."

Across painting, sculpture, photography, textile, and other media, selected artists will explore what it means to carry memory across time, space, and context, to make beauty out of struggle, and to insist on joy as a radical act. Rooted in history, or present worlds, the chosen works will be ones that speak to our audience and carry stories that resonate with our current lived experiences.

Art as

• Testimony Art bears witness — giving form to what history attempted to silence or erase.
• Defiance Art insists on presence — asserting that survival is itself a creative act.
• Memory Art preserves — carrying ancestral knowledge forward across time, displacement, and rupture.
• Joy Art celebrates — Black joy as radical refusal; carnival, ritual, and pleasure as liberatory practice.
• Reimagination Art speculates — envisioning futures beyond the present moment, from a place of endurance and possibility.