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This month marks the 50th anniversary of Cabo Verdean independence from Portugal, and the New Bedford Whaling Museum honors and celebrates that event with the exhibition “Claridade: Cape Verdean Identity in Contemporary Art” in the Wattles Family Gallery.
New Bedford and the surrounding communities in Massachusetts and Rhode Island have long been the home to one of the largest populations of Cabo Verdeans outside Cabo Verde itself.
It should be noted that the New Bedford Whaling Museum chose to use the anglicized Cape Verde, as opposed to the equally acceptable (Portuguese) Cabo Verde or (Kriolu or Criolu) Kabu Verdi, as it is the preferred terminology within the diasporic community of the South Coast. The diaspora, preceded by the complicated and ugly history of European colonialism, African slavery and the remnants of imperialism, ultimately forged a unique and thriving island-based identity.
The title of the exhibition, with its utilization of the Portuguese word “Claridade,” meaning “light” or “clarity,” was inspired by the Cabo Verdean literary review of the same name that was intermittently published from 1936 to 1960. It served as a platform for a long-term discussion around Cabo Verdean identity. And the exhibition is ambitious, bold, challenging, and beautiful, and it is clear proof that no ethnic community is a monolithic hive-mind entity.
“Claridade” features work by visual artists born in Cabo Verde, New Bedford and elsewhere in the U.S., and in the Netherlands.
The walls of the Wattles Family Gallery are painted a rather unstaid and garish shade of teal, that, against all odds, nonetheless works as a perfect backdrop for the assembled artworks.
At the entrance, there hangs the first of a number of works by Wanda C. Medina, a New Bedford-born artist who graduated from the Swain School of Design in the mid-1970s and recently moved to Arizona. Her “Basic Principles,” an abstract landscape, situates floating black Xs on a pink background. Below there is something akin to a maroon mountainscape, and then a yellow stripe, and an array of concentric circles and rings.
Medina is an only child, as is her husband. They do not have children. The stacking suggests ancestry, lineage and community: what came before.
It is fitting that in the show are two paintings by her mother, Alice Silva Medina, one of a Martha’s Vineyard church. She went to Swain in the 1940s. There is a simple pencil drawing by Antone Silva, her maternal grandfather. It is a sketch of the boat he came on from Cabo Verde, nearly 100 years ago.
Right next to Medina’s work, vinyl lettering is applied to the wall. It is “Legacy” by poet and spoken word artist Maia Livramento. One can hear a recording of her rhythmic and flowing voice on a continuous loop, and it, too, has to do with those that preceded her.
It reads, in part:
“my legacy drapes over
my spirit like strings of
saltwater pearls and
glass bead rosary
handed down directly
from the wrists necks,
pocket and pocketbooks
of my Nana and aunties,
Nana’s Nanas and
Aunty’s Aunty’s
women who did more
than keep a good plate
women who saved,
gave up, and took up
some good space
cooked us up some
good spiritual food and
fed us good grace for
goodness sake…”
Sculptor Christian Goncalves has any number of wonderfully rendered, thoughtful, and somewhat woeful and melancholy figures throughout the gallery space. The head and shoulders of a lone figure glistens with a coppery sheen. There are no facial features to speak … not eyes nor mouth. Stripped of identity. No vision. No voice. Called “The Ancestor,” the figure is draped in a cloak of twine.
Goncalves’ “Wall of Oligarchs,” created in 2024, could not be more timely. It consists of five anonymous figures behind a metallic wall of faux precious metal and speaks to political division and physical separation. The barrier turns to flame. There are cracks in the foundation. The wall is unstable. Exactly what the oligarchs want.
A few feet away is an 11-to-12-foot-long digital C-print by Dutch artist Sandim Mendes and it almost acts as a direct response to the oligarchs. Inexplicably called “Pão Pão Queijo Queijo” (bread bread cheese cheese), it features overlapping images of young Black adolescents, seemingly all girls, as defiantly resolute and forward looking as an army.
Mendes also exhibits something that is an installation that works as something akin to an altar. Her “Viuva Branca” features a painting of a Black woman in a white dress, her back to the viewer. She gathers up her dress as if to use it to carry things she has foraged or gathered from a garden. In front of the painting, there is a short table on which a vase of dried flowers sits, along with candles, polished stones in a decorative bowl, and incense.
Mendes seeks to reconcile “the two worlds under her skin”: born in the Netherlands but with roots in Cabo Verde. She focused on a story passed on down from her grandfather to her mother, and then on to her, about the phenomenon of the “white widows” of Cabo Verde. A consequence of colonialism and the ending of slavery, the settlers returned to Portugal, leaving their Black wives behind. They had become “widows” with living husbands and Mendes has honored them for their patience, bravery and strength.
New Bedford-born George Martins (1952-1991) is represented by a number of works, including a handsome portrait of a young man against a bright yellow background (courtesy of Jeanne Costa) and a copy of a 1987 children’s book that he illustrated for author Nikki Giovanni titled “Spin A Soft Black Song: Poems for Children.”
But it is his untitled portrait of five middle-aged men, three in fedoras and one wearing a cap, seated around a table drinking red wine and engaged in a bit of banter that is the most engaging. It resonates with a true sense of community. Their camaraderie is almost palpable.
Ellen Gallagher’s “Doll’s Eyes” (on loan from the Rose Art Museum) is a small work featuring hundreds of pairs of vacuous eyes, all about the size of Cheerios, that, at first glance, might be mistaken for a goofy cartoon. Among all those eyes, there are, here and there, occasional pairs of lips.
Her 1992 work is made of graphite, oil paint, paper on canvas mounted on wood. It tackles the crude and cruel traditions of the minstrel shows, in which white performers would replicate racially stereotyped features of Blackness — namely, eyes and lips — to play Black characters on stage.
She rightly describes minstrelsy as “the first great American abstraction … disembodied eyes and lips float, hostage, in the electric Black of the minstrel stage, distorting the African body into the American blackface.”
Gallagher’s goes even deeper into the absurdity and agony visited upon Black men and, even more particularly, Black women with “DeLuxe,” which consists of 60 white framed images culled from magazine advertisements from the 1930s through the 1970s, many from mainstream publications aimed at Black consumers, notably Ebony, Sepia, and Tan and Black Confessions.
The artist examines the human desire to change or conform, even if that desire is manipulated by commercial interests, social propaganda and colorism. She transforms ads for skin lighteners, hair straighteners, and wigs, by increasing the promotion of negative self-image and an “erasure of Blackness” to an absurd proportion.
The real ads include products such as “Duke’s Greaseless Hair Pomade for Men,” “Snow White Custom Styled Cosmetics,” and “DeLuxe Bleaching Cream.”
As repulsive as the original advertisements were, Gallagher’s reimagined versions challenge the viewer to reexamine the prejudice and ugliness of earlier times from which we still have not fully emerged.
Another poem, this one by Shauna Barbosa, is posted next to Gallagher’s work.
Written in 2018, it’s called “This Won’t Make Sense in English.”
It starts:
“I’ve worn this wig long enough
this shit is mine raise your hand
if you’re too tired to wrap your
real hair at night…”
And so it goes.
There is much more to see and much more to consider.
“Claridade: Cape Verdean Identity in Contemporary Art” will be on display at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, 18 Johnny Cake Hill, until Dec. 7.
Don Wilkinson has been writing art reviews, artist profiles and cultural commentary on the South Coast for over a decade. He has been published in local newspapers and regional art magazines. He is a graduate of the Swain School of Design and the CVPA at UMass Dartmouth. Email him at dwilkinson@newbedfordlight.org
Having Don Wilkinson writing and covering New Bedford art is a true gift. His pieces are he best possible way to find out what is going on with the arts.
Peggi Medeiros