Claridade: Cape Verdean Identity in Contemporary Art

In 2025, communities across the world will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Cape Verdean independence from Portugal. New Bedford and the greater South Coast area of New England are home to one of the largest and longest-standing Cape Verdean communities outside of Cabo Verde. In marking this occasion, the New Bedford Whaling Museum presents the Contemporary Cape Verdean 2025 project, which explores the Cape Verdean American and Cape Verdean experience through the lens of contemporary art and community storytelling.

The exhibition Claridade: Cape Verdean Identity in Contemporary Art, hosted in the Wattles Family Gallery, weaves together work by four to six contemporary Cape Verdean and Cape Verdean American visual artists and filmmakers. The title of the exhibition is inspired from the Cape Verdean literary review Claridade that ran intermittently from 1936 to 1960. Portuguese for “clarity” or “light,” the publication served as a platform for discussion and analysis around Cape Verdean identity. Working as a space for similar reflections and consideration, the exhibition will include sculpture, fiber arts, mixed media works on paper, paintings, poetry, and video installation and include artists who were born on Cape Verde, those who emigrated to the United States, and those born in the United States. The works will reflect distinct personal experiences and visual identities of the different artists while also exploring the role of visual art in shaping and affirming cultural identity.

Some of the artists included in the exhibition include fiber artist Wanda C. Medina, who currently lives and works in New Bedford, and Providence-based sculptor Christian Gonçalves (b. 1964), who creates minimalist sculptural works that evoke human and ship forms inspired by his sea-faring ancestors. Multi-disciplinary artist Ellen Gallagher (b. 1965) works in painting, paper, mixed media, film, and audio. Born in Providence and based in New York and Amsterdam, her focus spans oceanography and microscopic life to race relations, Black representation, and postwar abstraction. Filmmaker and curator Janilda Bartolomeu, born in Cabo Verde and based in the Netherlands, creates film and media works on the Cape Verdean diaspora, decolonial cinema, and collective memories.

Cape Verdean and Cape Verdean American art is often either presented as influenced by Portuguese or Western African cultures. However, the histories of settler colonialism, slavery, and imperialism in the region fomented a uniquely syncretic experience rooted in an island-focused identity but made distinctive between islands and across waves of emigration from the islands to the United States and beyond. The diaspora and assimilation in the United States rendered a more multicultural and critical engagement by Cape Verdean descended artists with what it means to be Cape Verdean outside the islands of Cape Verde.

Many artists in the exhibition grapple directly with these histories and their legacies today exploring this underlying shared heritage and its unique cultural and artistic foundations and influences. By setting into conversation works by contemporary artists from Cape Verde and those of Cape Verdean descent living or working in the United States we hope to demonstrate the rich cultural networks and shared heritage of this diverse group of celebrated artists.