Continuing Resistance: A Century of Black Liberation (1925–2025)

Kavi Gupta presents Continuing Resistance: A Century of Black Liberation (1925–2025), Bringing together contemporary artists Ernie Barnes, Alfred Conteh, Theaster Gates, Jae Jarrell, Glenn Ligon, Devan Shimoyama, Nikko Washington and Gerald Williams, alongside historic photographs by Stephen Shames, James Van Der Zee and other ephemera from the Kavi Gupta archive, the exhibition traces a visual genealogy that extends into the present. Across media, these works insist on aesthetic practice as a mode of sovereignty: a space in which representation exceeds documentation to become an act of world-building, refusal, and self-determination. Continuing Resistance: A Century of Black Liberation (1925–2025) positions artistic production within the Black radical tradition as an enduring site of political imagination and insurgent knowledge across a century of practice. Rather than framing resistance as episodic or reactive, the exhibition advances an understanding of resistance as a sustained praxis articulated through visual form, collective authorship, and the ongoing struggle for self-definition against regimes of erasure and containment. Spanning generations, the presentation foregrounds the development of visual languages capable of holding both historical memory and speculative futurity. The exhibition proposes that Black liberation is not merely represented through art but materially produced by it; through images that preserve communal memory, contest dominant epistemologies, and expand the conditions of visibility. Within this framework, artistic practice emerges not as symbolic response alone but as durable cultural infrastructure, continuing to shape the political, social, and imaginative horizons of the present. Conceived as an extension of Mapping Resistance: The Legacy of Black Liberation (1925–1975), this exhibition expands the historical frame to trace a fuller, more continuous arc of Black resistance across the past century. Where the earlier project established a critical foundation—foregrounding key artists, movements, and political conditions that shaped mid-20th century struggles for liberation—Continuing Resistance builds outward, emphasizing the multiplicity, persistence, and evolving strategies of that resistance into the present. Rather than a closed narrative, the exhibition operates as a widening field: mapping not only moments of rupture and visibility, but also the quieter, sustained practices of survival, refusal, and reimagination that define the breadth of the subject. In doing so, it resists containment, insisting on Black liberation as an ongoing, generative force—one that exceeds periodization and continues to unfold across time, geography, and artistic form.