Exit Art

A quarter-century on, Exit Art keeps to an old-school definition of an alternative space. It presents art as a vehicle of social change; it tackles big ideas given short shrift elsewhere; it privileges those ideas over market-approved versions of fashion and beauty. In all these ways “Négritude” is a classic Exit Art show: ambitious, uneven, didactic in a way now unfashionable and valiant in a way that won’t go out of fashion.

Négritude was a cultural movement that became a social movement. Initially shaped by two statesman-poets living in Paris in the 1930s, Aimé Césaire of Martinique and Léopold Senghor of Senegal, its goal was to recover an essence of African-ness suppressed by colonial rule. The recovery effort was aimed toward aesthetics but contributed mightily to independence struggles in Africa, as well as to African-American and Afro-Caribbean culture .