These artists have honored Aponte’s vision of a world defined not by totalizing elite whiteness, but by a social structure and cosmology that reimagine history and the present through the lens of Black power. Today, twenty artists, most of them Afro-Caribbean, have further amplified the book’s-and Aponte’s-power by resurrecting some of its pages (or láminas) in their own artworks based on self-chosen passages from the transcription.
#LAMINAS DE MULTIPANEL FULL#
Just before his murder, authorities forced Aponte to explain each image, so though the actual “book of paintings” is lost to time, it lives on in the ekphrastic transcription of that interrogation, which can be found in full at Digital Aponte, an accessible repository of scholarly research conducted by NYU Professor Ada Ferrer and art historian Linda Rodríguez. At the opening, Carrié gave context for how the exhibition came to be. Where Aponte, who almost certainly could not read or write, gleaned this vast historical and cultural knowledge remains a mystery verging on a miracle, explained Edouard Duval Carrié, artist and co-curator of the new exhibition Visionary Aponte: Art and Black Freedom at the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery, which has traveled to NYU, Duke, Havana, and Santiago, and will continue on to Harvard before heading back to the Caribbean. In searching Aponte’s home, the Spanish found an astonishing object, what they described as a “book of paintings”: a bound compendium of sixty-three densely illustrated pages that depicted dark-skinned people as kings, warriors, and philosophers across a breadth of eras and contexts, from the garden of Eden to ancient Greece and Ethiopia.
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