I went from rage to pleasure to mysterious calm in two hours and 200 feet last week at the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture. By the end of my visit to three exhibits, my brain was full, but my face was smiling.
...
“Praise House,” one floor down, takes its name from a small black-and-white photo of a humble wooden chapel on St. Helena Island. Adama Delphine Fawundu uses it to link her Mende roots in Sierra Leone to this South Carolina center of Gullah culture.
For Fawundu, the African Diaspora reaches from the American South to South America and beyond. Actions in her photos can be as mundane as men cutting potato leaves or as mystical as a woman stretching out her arms against an ancient wall in Buenos Aires, while she wears a dress of dazzling blue and a mask of shells and African cloth. Her gesture echoes the lines of an adjacent photo from Colombia, a wall silhouette of a soldier holding up his rifle.
