As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic

As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic
Dec 6, 2025 – Apr 26, 2026

United States United States — Art Museum
101 Monroe Center St NW
Grand Rapids, MI 49503

At the heart of the exhibition As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic lies a deep belief in community, connection, and shared legacy. Drawn from the celebrated Wedge Collection, founded in 1997 by Dr. Kenneth Montague, this exhibition reflects Canada’s most significant privately held collection dedicated to championing Black artists. Its title, inspired by a phrase often spoken by Montague’s father—“lifting as we rise”—embodies an ethic of collective advancement. It calls for individual success to serve as a foundation for broader empowerment, extending generosity and pride beyond family to an ever-expanding circle of kinship and belonging.

In this spirit, As We Rise celebrates both the intimate and the communal. The photographs within are acts of representation and recognition—images in which Black subjects, seen through the eyes of Black photographers, appear on their own terms. Their gazes meet the viewer’s not as subjects of study, but as collaborators in the act of seeing. This mutuality of vision—honest, elegant, and unforced—infuses the works with warmth and immediacy. Each frame becomes part of a collective portrait, a living archive of experience and emotion. The results are as diverse and unexpected as the communities from which they emerge, echoing the vibrant multiplicity of the Black Atlantic.

Themes of identity, heritage, and empowerment intertwine throughout, not as isolated concerns but as natural expressions of life’s complexity. These images carry within them the textures of joy and resistance, beauty and endurance. As curator Liz Ikiriko notes, they “foreground the experience of Black life, in all its myriad forms”—a testament to resilience and connection that transcends geography. Together, they form a declaration of presence, a visual affirmation of home across the global diaspora.

Image: James Barnor, Drum Cover Girl Erlin Ibreck, Kilburn, London, 1966, from As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic (Aperture, 2021). Courtesy Autograph ABP © James Barnor


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