Kwame Brathwaite, Untitled (Couple’s Embrace), ca.1971. Archival pigment print. Courtesy Kwame Brathwaite Archive and Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles. © Kwame Brathwaite Archive

Kwame Brathwaite: Revolutionary Movements at the Mead Museum at Amherst College will foreground photographer Kwame Brathwaite’s (b.1938, New York; d.2023, New York) deep engagement with social and political movements and his enduring attention to the liberated Black body. The exhibition centers Brathwaite's activism and focuses on the body as seen through many kinds of movement, ranging from concert performance and fashion shoot posing to dancing, boxing, and embracing. 

For this project, Lisa Crossman and Siddhartha Shah will work closely with the artist’s son and daughter-in-law, Kwame and Robynn Brathwaite (who run the Kwame Brathwaite Archive and are both Amherst graduates). These relationships will shape both the selection of materials and the exhibition’s interpretive framework. The show will tell new stories about the artist’s work through photographs from his archive that have never before been publicly released, alongside a selection of recently published studio portraits. The images range from scenes of everyday life and protest to those that convey Black joy, style, music, love and tenderness; the grace and power of the body in motion; as well as Pan-African solidarity and Black unity. 

Kwame Brathwaite, Untitled (Dap), ca.1970. Archival pigment print. Courtesy Kwame Brathwaite Archive and Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles. © Kwame Brathwaite Archive

Students will help interpret the works and develop programs, and courses in Black studies, American studies, music, theater and dance, and art history will engage with the exhibition in the classroom. Partnerships with Amherst’s athletics department and Dance and Step at Amherst College will explore Black movement as resistance, while the Center for Restorative Practices will facilitate student-led talking circles on Blackness and liberation.

Kwame Brathwaite, Untitled (Abbey Lincoln and Dancer), ca.1965. Archival pigment print. Courtesy Kwame Brathwaite Archive and Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles. © Kwame Brathwaite Archive

Siddhartha V. Shah is the John Wieland 1958 Director of the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, where he oversees the museum’s creative vision and operations, as well as a variety of initiatives aimed at deepening engagement with the community both on and off campus. Fostering intersectional learning and cross-cultural understanding through the arts has long been a guiding principle of Shah’s life and career. Before joining Amherst, he served as Curator of South Asian Art and Director of Education and Civic Engagement at the Peabody Essex Museum (Salem, MA). He received a BA in Art History from Johns Hopkins University, an MA in Hindu Philosophy and Jungian Psychoanalysis from the California Institute of Integral Studies, and a PhD in Art History and Archaeology from Columbia University. 

Lisa Crossman is Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, where she oversees the department’s operations, including its exhibition program. Her work centers exhibition making as a transformative process with the potential to be part of institutional change. Crossman’s curatorial projects explore the visual arts as part of interdisciplinary conversations through collaboration with artists, students, faculty, staff, and guest curators, among others. Previously, she was Curator at the Fitchburg Art Museum and worked with the Cultural Agents Initiative at Harvard University. Crossman holds a PhD in Art History and Latin American Studies from Tulane University.

Marina Reyes Franco, Abdiel D. Segarra Ríos, Alexandra T. Méndez García, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (MAC)