Back to Africa II

“This work is inspired by Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa Movement and Negro World, the newspaper of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, and other publications like it. I am interested in the movement and migration of Black bodies globally and historically, but most particularly the movement of my parents: my Father, an African American man who comes from a history of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade, and my mother, a Coloured South African of mixed decent who left her country to flee the oppressive apartheid government. Their union allowed for me to choose to migrate back to Africa, specifically the country of my mother, in search of ‘greener pastures’. The visual media stemming from the slave trade and Garvey’s movement up to the present serve as referential images that I aim to re-contextualise or expand on through collage and print.”
—Nathaniel Sheppard III