The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
Surrounding Programs
View our African art fair programs
Wednesday, Nov 30th – 7 pm
VIP Preview Launch
AfriKin Art 2022: The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
Distinguished evening for welcoming our invited collectors and guests for an experience fusing the arts and the Moorish architectural ambiance of Opa-locka that rearticulate the sophistication of an Exhibition that builds on the 1968 novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born by Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah. The depth of the artworks, elegance of attendees and the sponsored curated cocktail bar and Sensory Culinary Palate Pleasing Experience makes for a memorable opening to AfriKin Art 2022.
AfriKin Honoree Recipient
Barrington Irvin – a local young Black pilot that flew around the world.
Thursday, Dec 1st – 7 pm
AfriKin Talk – LOCI OF AFFILIATION: The Artist as a producer of Knowledge
In fostering new loci of affiliation away from the romantic illusion of pure distance and total autonomy of the artist from society, this conversation engages artists in exploring how their works respond to the issues that currently beset the global community.
How do artists of African descent create modes of intervention no longer predicated upon legitimizations from hegemonic discourses beyond their historical and contemporary experiences? How have they provided counter-narratives of radical autonomy unfazed by merely restating the tacit necessity of the place of art in society”?
The obsolete representation of the artists by the Romantic vision from the 19th century, which assigned them a kind of ethereality, is antithetical to individuals in tune with the realities of their society and dealing with them with their specific language. With the objectives of social transformation, they set to produce questions and emotions, alerts, and sensations. Their creations are an integral part of the production of Knowledge which offers possibilities to bring the artist closer to the intellectual, whose activity is to question the world.
Friday, Dec 2nd – 7 pm
AfriKin Talk – NARRATIVES OF RESISTANCE: The Poetics and Politics of Staying Human
Transnational migrations and the cultural products they engender represent as many continuities as possible, departures, adoptions, rejections, encounters, interactions and fusions of processes of plural contemporalities. These processes that Narratives of Resistance engage in describe a quest for a transcultural aesthetic of a global imagination away from an ontological essence that may be specific to any one group. Thus, while focusing on Africa and the African Diaspora, they also open to other expressive experiences.
Saturday, December 3rd – 5 pm
A reading of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born with a Q& A following.
Saturday, December 3rd – 7 pm
AfriKin Talk – Black Women’s Rights: Leadership and the Circularities of Power – Panel Discussion
This talk focuses on the manifestation of leadership as expressed, narrativized, and represented by women of African descent. It uses the language of “rights” and “power” to assert that Black women find strategic alternatives to the male-dominated leadership status quo and are the leaders of the future.
Sunday, December 4th – 7 pm
“free to choose, choose what they want” by Olujimi Dance Collective
“free to choose, choose what they want” is an excerpt of T.W.E.R.K., an acronym for Transnational dance practices and Works that Evoke Revolutionary Kinship. This excerpt is an exploration in the duration of exhaustion that resides in oppression and the desire for liberation, pathways and the divine feminine power release. This section was inspired by “The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born by Ayi Kwei Armah.
Creative concept: Michelle Grant-Murray
Choreography: Michelle Grant-Murray and dancers
Dancers: A’Keitha Carey, Shanna Woods, Alina Spears, Erika Loyola
Founder and Artistic Director: Michelle Grant-Murray