“As We Rise” presents 100+ photographs showcasing Black Atlantic life

Walk into As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic and you feel it fast: this is photography that treats Black life as a home base, not a problem to solve. The show, now on view at Michigan’s Grand Rapids Art Museum (GRAM) through April 26, 2026, pulls together more than 100 photographs from across Africa, the Caribbean, South America, the United States, Canada, and Great Britain, all drawn from Dr. Kenneth Montague’s Wedge Collection in Toronto.

This traveling exhibition is built from the Wedge Collection, founded by Dr. Kenneth Montague, and it takes its title from a phrase tied to his father: “Lifting as we rise.” The collection’s logic is simple and specific: photography becomes a public resource. Images that could stay private move into institutions and into conversation, and the work of Black photographers gets a wider stage.

Aperture organized the exhibition and Elliott Ramsey curated it. The full traveling presentation includes 108 works, including one video.

What you’ll see

GRAM describes the exhibition as a wide-angle look at Black life through community, identity, and power, with Black subjects depicted by Black photographers as they wish to be seen. That framing points to what dominates here: portraits and scenes where the subject participates in how they appear, whether that looks like direct eye contact, a deliberate pose, a chosen outfit, a controlled studio setting, or a candid moment where the camera’s presence still feels understood.

The artist list spans generations and photographic languages. You will encounter names that anchor major chapters of photographic history, alongside contemporary artists shaping how portraiture and documentary work function right now. GRAM points to artists including Stan Douglas, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Barkley L. Hendricks, Texas Isaiah, Liz Johnson Artur, Seydou Keïta, Deana Lawson, Jamel Shabazz, and Carrie Mae Weems. Aperture’s roster expands the field further, including figures such as James Barnor, Kwame Brathwaite, Gordon Parks, Malick Sidibé, Samuel Fosso, Ming Smith, Hank Willis Thomas, Mickalene Thomas, James Van Der Zee, and Kehinde Wiley, among many others.

Expect variety in setting and mood. Some images carry the polish of studio portrait traditions. Some live in the street, in neighborhoods, at parties, on stoops, inside barbershops, at work. Some are constructed with the precision of contemporary art photography, where gesture, framing, and surface are part of the meaning. The cumulative effect is a visual map of Black presence across the Atlantic world, built out of everyday life and deliberate self-fashioning.

How to view photography

One of the best things As We Rise offers is a way of experiencing images. You can apply it to the images you scroll past every day, to family photos, to school portraits, to street photography, to campaign images, to music press shots, to whatever visual culture lands in front of you.

Many of these photographs hold a clear social contract. The subject appears aware of the lens, and you can feel a kind of mutual understanding in the gaze. That is a useful reading tool anywhere: who is in control of the image’s tone, and what signals tell you the subject had agency in how they appear?

Across the Black Atlantic, style has long functioned as strategy: a way to claim dignity, signal belonging, broadcast aspiration, or build community. In photographs, clothing, hair, posture, and setting operate like captions. Practice reading those details the way you would read a headline.

Track how “place” is shown. “Black Atlantic” is a geography of movement, connection, and cultural exchange. In images, that can appear as architecture, signage, light, interior design, studio backdrops, uniforms, street corners, or the way people gather. Look for the clues that locate a photo in a world, then ask what that world says about possibility.

Ask what the image is trying to preserve. The question works because it makes you treat photography as more than representation. It becomes a container for what a community wants to carry forward.