Asha Brisebois – The Tokyo Show: Black is Beautiful

As a project-based thesis, The Tokyo Show: Black is Beautiful will take place in November 2017 in Tokyo, Japan, as an experimental curatorial practice and multi-site exhibition of Black American art. Part of the goal is for the works and cultural presence to be active and accessible as both exhibition and resource at different locations around the city.

Part of my engagement as both a critical observer and a creative researcher, over the past two years at SAIC, has been in how Black Americans are imagined and represented abroad, historically and at present. Thus, within the immediate writing process of my recent thesis—and also the forthcoming curatorial process—I am asking myself this question: What does it mean to represent yourself, and others, as an African American? and, What does it mean to learn to do this through the arts?

“Black is Beautiful…” The origination and the context of this call within America has a more than fifty-year-old history, emerging from the 1960s Black power and civil rights movements.  I am wondering now, as a project of the curatorial, what does it mean to say black is beautiful elsewhere? What does it mean to say black is beautiful abroad?

In its staging in Japan in November 2017, The Tokyo Show: Black is Beautiful seeks to achieve context for: art as an instigator for cross-cultural dialogues across global space; art as an instigator for potentially disruptive private and public conversations on the construction of “race;” presentations of Black American life. In a commitment to art and exhibition projects that are organized independently from large institutional oversight or market validation, The Tokyo Show: Black is Beautiful additionally views itself as part of the wider discourse on developing independent projects and spaces that are formidable.