Dreamtime in Newark: Aljira and the Making of Global Contemporary Art

Newark Museum of Art, Oct 15 – Jun 30 2027: 66 works, 43 artists, one storefront. Guyanese artists Victor Davson and Carl E. Hazlewood started Aljira in 1983, sixteen years after the Newark Rebellion and a decade after the city’s first Black-owned gallery. They showed Dawoud Bey, Firelei Báez and Jeffrey Gibson before the institutions did, ran a program called Emerge, and took a US show to the biennial in Cuenca in 1994. Then the 2008 debt caught them and in 2018 they closed without warning. Davson has been keeping the archive alive himself since. And the museum four blocks away is now mounting the survey the space could not afford to survive to see.