As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic

Drawn from Dr. Kenneth Montague’s Wedge Collection in Toronto — a Black-owned collection dedicated to artists of African descent—As We Rise looks at the myriad experiences of Black life through the lenses of community, identity, and power.

Organized by Aperture, New York, the exhibition features more than 100 works by Black artists from Canada, the Caribbean, Great Britain, the United States and South America, as well as throughout the African continent. Black subjects depicted by Black photographers are presented as they wish to be seen, recognizing the complex strength, beauty, and vulnerability of Black life.

Artists such as Stan Douglas, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Barkley L. Hendricks, Texas Isaiah, Liz Johnson Artur, Seydou Keïta, Deana Lawson, Jamel Shabazz, and Carrie Mae Weems, touch on themes of agency, beauty, joy, belonging, subjectivity, and self-representation.

As artist and curator Liz Ikiriko writes in the accompanying catalogue: ​“The pictures here forefront the experience of Black life, in all its myriad forms: a marker of the histories and spaces (real and ephemeral) that transcend geographic boundaries… The collection extends out to a global diaspora and proclaims, ​‘We are home.’”