The Black Atlantic: Art Across the Middle Passage

Black Atlantic art is work by Africans and their descendants shaped by forced movement across the ocean rather than a single nation, a frame Paul Gilroy set out in 1993 with the ship, not the homeland, as the organizing image.

That's the argument in one sentence. The rest of this is what it looks like on actual objects, because the idea only earns its keep if you can point at things.

What did Paul Gilroy actually argue?

Gilroy published The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness with Harvard University Press in 1993. His target was a habit he saw on every side of the conversation: the assumption that Black culture belongs to a country. English culture here, American culture there, African culture back at the source, each one sealed off and accounted for.

He said that model doesn't describe what happened. The cultures that came out of the Atlantic slave trade weren't separate national traditions that happened to rhyme. They were one formation, made by people and books and records and arguments crossing the water in both directions for four centuries. A Black British writer reading W.E.B. Du Bois. A Cuban painter trained in Madrid. A record cut in Detroit and played in Kingston. Gilroy pulled the phrase double consciousness from Du Bois to name what that feels like from the inside, and he used it against cultural nationalism of every flavor.

The move that made the book stick was the image. Instead of a map with a homeland at the center and diaspora radiating outward, Gilroy proposed the ship in motion. Ships carried the captives. They also carried sailors, pamphlets, sheet music, returning intellectuals, and news. A ship is a place and a moment at the same time, which is why he made it the unit of analysis instead of a nation.

Robert Farris Thompson had been working the same water for longer. Thompson taught at Yale for more than half a century, and his Flash of the Spirit, published in 1984 and continuously in print since, traced five African civilizations (Yoruba, Kongo, Ejagham, Mande and Cross River) straight into the art and philosophy of the United States, Cuba, Haiti, Trinidad, Mexico and Brazil. Gilroy supplied the theory. Thompson supplied the receipts.

Was there a literal ship?

Thousands, and one of them is now on display.

The São José sailed from Mozambique for Brazil and broke apart on submerged rock near Cape Town in December 1794 with more than 400 enslaved people aboard. Over 200 of them died. Iziko Museums of South Africa describes it as the first known shipwreck carrying enslaved Africans to be identified, studied and excavated, and the exhibition built around it is now permanent at the Iziko Slave Lodge.

That wreck sits at the exact point Gilroy is talking about. A Portuguese vessel, a Mozambican cargo, a Brazilian destination, a South African seabed, and an American museum partnership doing the archaeology. No single national frame holds it. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database puts the total number of Africans embarked at roughly 12.5 million, with about 10.7 million surviving to disembark. The gap is the Middle Passage.

What does a culture made in transit look like on an object?

Start with something unglamorous. Colonoware is hand-built, unglazed, low-fired earthenware made by enslaved people on plantations from the late seventeenth century through the nineteenth. The Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery holds records on more than 135,000 sherds of it, recovered across Virginia, South Carolina, the Caribbean, and parts of North Carolina and Georgia. Note that geography. The same pottery tradition turns up on both sides of a border that historians usually treat as decisive.

Some of these bowls carry marks cut into the base after firing rather than during manufacture, often a cross or an X. The archive connects those marks to the cosmogram, a geometric figure representing the cosmos that BaKongo priests used on the southwest coast of Africa, and it notes that some archaeologists read the marked bowls as leftovers from ceremonies. If that reading holds, enslaved potters in the Carolina lowcountry were inscribing a Kongo cosmology onto vessels used for food and medicine.

Not everyone accepts the reading. Christopher Espenshade argued in 2023 that the marks are too imprecise for people intending to place a sacred symbol, and that many were probably ownership or ritual-participant marks instead. Both positions are worth knowing. What neither side disputes is that people carried something across, and that it surfaced in clay.

Move a few hundred miles southeast and the evidence gets loud. Haitian Vodou flags, called drapo, are made of satin, velvet or rayon and worked over with sequins, beads and appliqué. The Fowler Museum at UCLA holds more than 120 of them, dating from the early 1900s through the 1990s. Each one salutes a specific lwa in that spirit's colors. And the visual sources are a list of everything that washed up on the island: African symbols merged with Catholic processional banners, French military ensigns, and Masonic flags and aprons.

That's the Black Atlantic in one object. Not African survival, not European imitation, but a third thing assembled from whatever the crossing put within reach. Our guide to pan-African art works through the same logic on the political side, and the Gullah Geechee art guide covers the American version, where West African basketry, rice culture and language survived intact on the Sea Islands.

Why did the same inheritance produce such different painting?

Because transit scatters people, and where you land shapes the work.

Wifredo Lam was born in Cuba in 1902 to a mother of Spanish and African descent and a Cantonese Chinese father. He spent eighteen years in Europe. Tate's account of him is blunt about what happened next: he went home to Cuba and rediscovered local African traditions that transformed his painting, and the result challenged Western modernism rather than decorating it. He'd been in the room with the Surrealists. He came out painting something they couldn't have made.

Frank Bowling took the same ocean in the other direction. Born in 1934 in British Guiana, he left New Amsterdam for London in 1953, then moved to New York in 1966 and won a Guggenheim Fellowship the following year. Between 1967 and 1971 he made the map paintings, huge canvases with stencilled world maps and silkscreened images floating in fields of color. Tate's guide to the Bowling retrospective points out the detail that matters: the southern hemisphere usually dominates those canvases, which is Bowling rejecting westerncentric cartography with a stencil.

Lubaina Himid works the same ground from Britain. Her 2004 installation Naming the Money fills a room with life-size cut-out figures of Black servants from European courts, each one given a name and a story she wrote. Tate describes her project as putting people of African descent at the center of a shared cultural history they've usually been cut out of. She won the Turner Prize in 2017.

Then there's Ellen Gallagher, whose ongoing Watery Ecstatic series the Whitney has held since 2003. The drawings are built from a myth invented in 1997 by the Detroit electronic group Drexciya: an underwater civilization descended from pregnant West African women thrown from slave ships. Gallagher carves into thick watercolor paper the way whalers carved scrimshaw into bone, and collages tiny minstrel-derived faces into the surface. A Detroit techno record, a whaling technique, a minstrel stereotype and the Middle Passage, all in one sheet of paper. Gilroy could have written the wall label.

When did museums start hanging it this way?

Recently, and not everywhere.

Afro-Atlantic Histories opened at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo and Instituto Tomie Ohtake in 2018 with 450 works by 214 artists spanning the sixteenth through twenty-first centuries. The curators built it around the flows among Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean and Europe rather than around any one country, and they put Brazil at the center on the grounds that it received roughly 46 percent of the Africans carried across the Atlantic. The show traveled to the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 2022.

Tate Britain ran Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s to Now from December 2021 to April 2022, with more than forty artists including Aubrey Williams, Donald Locke, Horace Ové, Sonia Boyce, Claudette Johnson, Hurvin Anderson and Alberta Whittle. Same premise. The Caribbean didn't stay in the Caribbean, and neither did the art.

Where does African American art sit in all this?

It's one shore of the same ocean, not a separate subject.

The point of the Black Atlantic frame isn't to blur everything into a single style. Haitian drapo, Cuban modernism, Black British painting and African American work are genuinely distinct traditions with different histories, different patrons and different arguments. What they share is an origin in the same forced movement and a habit of building from mixed materials. Reading them together makes each one legible in a way that reading them alone does not.

Noirci Studio is not a museum and doesn't pretend to be one. It doesn't sell drapo, or Lam, or Bowling. What it sells is African American art on archival canvas, printed to order in the United States, with the artist paid a royalty on every sale, including founder Robert Lawrence, who has been painting since 2006. If the history above is why you want something on the wall, our African American framed wall art is the part of that history we can actually put in your house.

How does this change what you hang?

It changes the question you ask about a piece.

The lazy version of buying diaspora art is to shop for a look: a color palette, a pattern, a silhouette that reads as African at ten feet. The Black Atlantic frame makes that harder in a useful way, because it insists that the interesting thing about the work is the route it took, not the surface. Who made this. What did they inherit. What did they pick up along the way that wasn't theirs to begin with, and what did they do with it.

You can apply that standard without a degree. Ask a seller to name the artist. Ask what tradition the imagery comes from and whether the person who made it has any relationship to that tradition. If nobody can answer, you're looking at a look, not a lineage.

And when you get the work home, treat it like part of a conversation rather than a single accent piece. Our guide to displaying diaspora art at home covers the practical side: grouping, spacing, sightlines, and how to hang two things that came from different places so they read as related instead of random.

Gilroy's ship never docks. That's the point. The culture is still in motion, and your wall is one of the places it stops.

Sources

• Harvard University Press, Paul Gilroy, "The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness" (1993): publisher of record for the book, its full title, and its 1993 publication date.
• Yale News, "Robert Farris Thompson, pioneer in study of African and Afro-Atlantic art" (December 1, 2021): Thompson's more than fifty years on the Yale faculty, the 1984 publication of "Flash of the Spirit" and its continuous print run, and his focus on the art, history, culture, dance and music of the Afro-Atlantic world.
• Penguin Random House, Robert Farris Thompson, "Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy," publisher listing: the five African civilizations traced in the book (Yoruba, Kongo, Ejagham, Mande and Cross River) and the New World societies where Thompson followed them, including the United States, Cuba, Haiti, Trinidad, Mexico and Brazil.
• Iziko Museums of South Africa, "Unshackled History: The Wreck of the Slave Ship São José, 1794": the December 1794 wreck near Cape Town, the Mozambique to Brazil route, more than 400 enslaved people aboard, over 200 deaths, the ship's status as the first known slave shipwreck identified, studied and excavated, and the exhibition's permanent installation at the Iziko Slave Lodge.
• SlaveVoyages, Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, Estimates: the standard scholarly estimates of roughly 12.5 million Africans embarked and about 10.7 million disembarked across the full span of the trade.
• Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery, "Colonoware": the definition of colonoware as hand-built, unglazed, low-fired local earthenware, its production by enslaved people, its late seventeenth through nineteenth century range, its recovery across Virginia, South Carolina, the Caribbean, North Carolina and Georgia, the database's record of more than 135,000 sherds, the post-firing marks on bowl bases, and the identification of the cosmogram as a geometric representation of the cosmos used by BaKongo priests, which some archaeologists read as evidence that the marked bowls came out of ceremonies.
• Fowler Museum at UCLA, "Saluting Vodou Spirits: Haitian Flags from the Fowler Collection": the museum's holding of more than 120 drapo dating from the early 1900s to the 1990s, their construction in satin, velvet or rayon with sequins, beads and appliqué, their dedication to individual lwa, and the merging of African symbols with Catholic processional banners, French military ensigns and Masonic flags and aprons.
• Tate Modern, "Wifredo Lam" (14 September 2016 to 8 January 2017): Lam's 1902 birth in Cuba, his mother's Spanish and African heritage and his father's Cantonese Chinese origin, his eighteen years in Europe, his return to Cuba and rediscovery of local African traditions, and the framing of his work as a challenge to Western modernism.
• Tate Britain, "Frank Bowling" exhibition guide (2019): Bowling's 1934 birth in British Guiana, his 1953 departure from New Amsterdam for London, his 1966 move to New York and subsequent Guggenheim Fellowship, the 1967 to 1971 map paintings with stencilled world maps and silkscreened images over fields of color, and the dominance of the southern hemisphere as a rejection of westerncentric cartography.
• Tate, "How Himid is rewriting history": the 2004 installation "Naming the Money," its historically inspired costumed figures, Himid's stated project of putting people of African descent at the center of shared cultural history, and her 2017 Turner Prize win.
• Whitney Museum of American Art, Ellen Gallagher, "Watery Ecstatic" (2001), accession 2003.73: the medium (watercolor, ink, oil, plasticine, graphite and cut paper on paper), the 1997 Drexciya myth of an underwater world peopled by descendants of pregnant West African women forced from slave ships, the collaged minstrel-derived faces, and Gallagher's comparison of her carving technique to scrimshaw.
• Museu de Arte de São Paulo, "Afro-Atlantic Histories" (29 June to 21 October 2018): the 450 works by 214 artists spanning the sixteenth to twenty-first centuries, the curatorial premise of flows among Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean and Europe, and the figure of roughly 46 percent of Africans transported across the Atlantic arriving in Brazil.
• National Gallery of Art, Washington, "Afro-Atlantic Histories" (2022): the United States presentation of the exhibition and its stated scope covering the historical experiences and cultural formations of Black and African people since the seventeenth century across Africa, Europe, the Americas and the Caribbean.
• Tate Britain, "Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s to Now" (1 December 2021 to 3 April 2022): the exhibition dates, its coverage of more than forty artists, and the named participants including Aubrey Williams, Donald Locke, Horace Ové, Sonia Boyce, Claudette Johnson, Hurvin Anderson and Alberta Whittle.
• Christopher T. Espenshade, "The meaning of imprecision: A reconsideration of marked colonoware in South Carolina," North American Archaeologist (2023): the argument that the marks on South Carolina colonoware are too imprecise to support the cosmogram reading and more likely indicate potters, owners or ritual participants. (Publisher page blocks automated access, so this source is listed without a link.)

Written by Robert Lawrence, painter and founder of Noirci Studio. Raised in Atlanta and trained at Clark Atlanta University, he has painted Black life from memory since 2006. He founded Noirci Studio, establishes its curatorial standards, and continues to make art. Every article is reviewed under our editorial guidelines.