Awre Journey: Twentieth-Century Afri-Caribbean Migration

Housatonic Museum of Art, Bridgeport, CT • housatonicmuseum.org • Through February 21, 2025

In Awre Journey: Twentieth-Century Afri-Caribbean Migration, Afri-Caribbean (1) artist Iyaba Ibo Mandingo tells the story of his ancestors’ immigration to Europe and North America and his immigration to the U.S. The paintings (2020–2023) in Awre Journey are also an ode to African American artist Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series (1940–1941), sixty panels that chronicle Black Americans migrating from the Jim Crow South to the industrial North.

Mandingo has studied Lawrence’s work and writes, “[Lawrence’s] dynamic cubist style brings each panel to life with sharp angles and primary colors….[he] created captions…that told the entire story.” (2) Like Lawrence, captions accompany Mandingo’s uniformly sized paintings. Awre Journey, however, features an extra panel because as Mandingo was completing the series, Harry Belafonte died, prompting a group portrait of Sidney Poitier, Cicely Tyson, and Belafonte to “mark the passing of three legendary Caribbean-American icons.” (3)

While the back gallery features additional work by Mandingo, Awre Journey inhabits the front room, hanging in an expansive, storyboard style grid. The chronological narrative begins in 1908, takes us through the Windrush Generation—approximately a half-million Caribbean people coming to Britain (1948–1970s)—and then illustrates Mandingo’s childhood experiences in Antigua and the U.S.

Visually, Mandingo strikes a thoughtful balance between the artist’s own style and Lawrence’s. Some works incorporate The Migration Series’ iconography, including “grips” (English suitcases) and birds; and Mandingo’s last panel mirrors Lawrence’s (a crowded railroad station, captioned “And the migrants kept coming”) with Afri-Caribbean people in a boat on choppy water, captioned: “But we continued to come, risking everything, hoping for better tomorrows.” Mandingo also selectively introduces some of Lawrence’s formal qualities, including facial features rendered with thick brushstrokes. Many of Lawrence’s faces in Migration had minimalist or no features, yet all of Mandingo’s Afri-Caribbean visages are detailed and express emotions such as joy, exhaustion, and affection. Interestingly, Mandingo draws no features on the white faces, a motif that concomitantly operates as a nod to Lawrence; a symbolic erasure of hegemonic narratives about immigration; and a recentering of Afri-Caribbean people and the important stories they hold.

— Terri C Smith

(1) This article uses the artist’s preferred term “Afri-Caribbean”: “For me Afri-Caribbean is a counter to the labeling Afro-Caribbean…defining ourselves is an important part of identity.” (email from Mandingo to the author). (2) Unless otherwise attributed, quotes are from the exhibition’s wall text. (3) Email from Mandingo to the author