b'de la terre, staged in Paris in 1989. Another landmark show was the 2002exposed to another culture, is part of the everyday lives of millions of people. documenta exhibition in Kassel, Germany, curated by the Nigerian curatorNew expressions emerge in the meeting and mixing of cultures. There is a and poet Okwui Enwezor, who contributed much to widening the art worldsgrowing interest in art that mirrors and reflects on these realities, but also in horizons. Pluralist approaches, cosmopolitanism, and expanded historicalworks that imagine other possible worlds, other histories and futures. narratives are now becoming expected from museums and Kunsthallen. AsThe Nigerian-American artist Toyin Ojih Odutola, born in 1985, first the author Ben Lerner has argued, The capacity to transcend history hasbecame known for her portraits, but her solo museum exhibition Untold Sto-historically been ascribed to white men of a certain class while denied tories, at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis in 2015, introduced story-individuals marked by difference (whether of race or gender). 1The idealtelling and text into her work. She had begun to give some of her portraits of of an art that is universal or timeless is challenged by new approachesimaginary subjects complex background histories that challenge stereotypes. that instead embrace difference. It is a matter both of including culturesPresenting comfortably-off families living in African societies that have nev-that have gone unrepresented in Western museums and art histories, ander been colonized, they suggest other possibilities, a kind of what if. of making visible groups that have been rendered invisible. Contempo- Mara Berro, born in Bogot, Colombia, in 1982, is another story-rary artists such as Michael Armitage, Jordan Casteel, Toyin Ojih Odutola,teller. Inspired by South American folklore, myth, fairy tales, poetry, and and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, to name but a few, paint marginalized Blackmagic realism, her paintings often depict women in situations that suggest and brown figures who have been historically sidelined and excluded fromflight or migration. One of her works, Oda a la Esperanza (Ode to Hope) art institutions. (2019) shows a group of girls in an institution-like environment and refers to In 1982, the novelist Salman Rushdie published an article in the Londonthe Trump administrations family-separation policy at the Mexican border. Times, The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance, addressing the responseBerros women and girls, however, are calm and dignified in an idealized of postcolonial voices to the literary canon of the colonial center. 2That re- way. Her paintings are collages built up from many layers of colored and sponse also appeared in the visual arts. A number of artists have focused onsometimes patterned Japanese paper, parts of which she also paints over. the legacy of US colonialism in relation to the countrys history of slavery and its treatment of Native Americans. Forbidden DesiresBetye Saar, born in Los Angeles, California, in 1926, makes assemblages of prints and found objects that she often places in boxes or window frames.With the rise of the feminist and gay-rights movements in the 1960s and Recalling religious objects such as reliquaries, but also inspired by ritual and70s, it became both possible and necessary to discuss and show sexuality tribal objects from Africa, these works are loaded with symbolic meaning.from perspectives that had been repressed, denied, or considered taboo. In the work Unearthing the Future (1991) she mixes religious and spiritualMartin Wong painted scenes from his neighborhood of Loisaida, the references with computer parts, creating a meeting between different ways ofHispanic section of Manhattans Lower East Side, where he lived beginning understanding the world. 3 in 1978. His parents were Chinese American, and his father had Mexican Jaune Quick-to-See Smith was born in 1940 and is an enrolled memberheritage, so Wong labeled himself ethnically Chino-Latino. His paintings of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, a Native American nation.chronicle the vibrant multicultural life of New York City. Many works were MemoryMap,thesubtitleofherretrospectiveatNewYorksWhitneycollaborations with the poet Miguel Piero, with whom he lived and who Museum of American Art in 2023, summarizes two main themes in her art :introduced him to the Nuyorican (the word is a combination of New York Memory, both personal and collective, as in the historical narratives thatand Puerto Rican) community. Wong worked Pieros poetry into his paint-her art challenges and the alternatives she offers ; and Map, as representa- ings, as graffiti on a wall, say, or a frieze surrounding a scene. He also turned tions of the land that was taken from her people. The maps in her paintingsPieros stories of his time in prison into erotic fantasies of men in uniform. of North America are often turned on their side, suggesting another perspec- African Temple at 9th Street (1985), which shows a dark building with tive. Another part of her engagement with the land is environmentalism.trash cans just outside the door and graffiti-like writing on the wall, speaks The Forest (C. S. 1854) (1990) is an assemblage of a saw placed on top of aof the meeting of the sacred and the profane, and of the need for spiritual row of trees painted in brown and ocher. Below the row of trees are writtenguidance in the hard reality of life in a poor inner-city neighborhood. The the initials C. S., for Chief Sealth (or Seattle, namesake of the city ofpainting was included in East Village USA (2005), an exhibition at New Yorks Seattle, Washington), and the year 1854when Sealth is said to have made aNew Museum celebrating the importance of the East Village art scene of the famous speech regarding the proposed sale of tribal lands. late 1970s and 80s, in which Wong was a central figure along with such Qualeasha Wood, born in New Jersey in 1996, makes tapestries andartists as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Futura 2 000, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, tufted textiles that address racial, sexual, and gender identity in a time ofand Laurie Simmons. It was something of an underground scene and Wong Internet and social media. In a series of self-portraits taken from computerwas not recognized by the more established art world until much later, when screenshots, the image is partly blocked by pop-up error messages;the vul- he was understood as a forerunner of the identity-driven work of the 1990s. nerability of these images is heightened by the Catholic iconography insertedPaula Regos paintings, drawings, and prints are often inspired by fairy into them. Other tufted works depict racist caricatures from cartoons.tales and literature in sources ranging from Portuguese folk tales to Disney, Homer, Shakespeare, and Jean Genet. Some works refer to literature directly, Exile, Displacement, Diaspora as in an edition of twenty-five lithographs from 2003 inspired by Charlotte Bronts novel Jane Eyre (1847). Rego rejected old hierarchies that scorned The experience of life in exile, of displacement and the cultures of diaspo- illustration : My paintings tell stories ; they do not illustrate stories. [.] they ras, is another aspect of colonialism and the migrations that came with it.are not narratives. [.] everything happens in the present. 4Many works are To remember and to long for a lost homeland and heritage, while also beingambiguous, psychologically complex, and sexually charged, exploring the'