Kunsthal KAdE extends 'Tell Me Your Story' through Aug. 30

As soon as conditions permit, Kunsthal KAdE will reopen to bring this extraordinary project back into public view. With the extension of Tell Me Your Story cancels the planned summer exhibition on committed artists in New York in the 1980s.

Tell Me Your Story opened on Feb. 7 and was highly successful in its first month. Critics appreciated the first overview of African-American art in the Netherlands. The Belgian weekly Knack wrote: Anyone who wants to see what art can do for people's self-understanding should go to Amersfoort to see the powerful works of black artists who are still far too unknown here with us. The Parool: Dealing and reckoning or transcending history is the common thread in Tell Me Your Story. (...) For this reason alone, a visit to KAdE in Amersfoort is a must. And for De Volkskrant, it is an impressive and grand exposition involving years of preparation.

Visitors also showed their appreciation in the guestbook: All the way from Belgium and it was well worth it!, 3rd visit, seen new things each time, Strong exhibition! Would like more black artists in European museums and Wonderful story full of contradictions. 

Tell Me Your Story tells the story of the African-American population through the past century. The exhibit is divided chronologically into five time periods: Harlem Renaissance (20s), Post Harlem Renaissance (20s to 50s), Civil Rights (60s and 70s), Black Renaissance (90s) and Bloom Generation (now). The common denominator among the various artists is the need to express themselves about their personal and collective history. In doing so, they stand in an important African tradition: storytelling.

The exhibition is curated by guest curator Rob Perrée: Black American artists have many important and many beautiful things to say. They want to be heard. Until now, they have hardly been heard in the Netherlands. This exhibition offers a unique opportunity to make up for that loss.

Over 140 loans, mostly from the United States, from 50 artists hang in Amersfoort. Now lauded names such as Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Gordon Parks, Robert Colescott, Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley and Henry Taylor are shown alongside lesser-known artists such as Aaron Douglas, Charles White, Elizabeth Catlett, Benny Andrews, Faith Ringgold, Todd Gray, Radcliffe Bailey and Devan Shimoyama. Many of the works are on view for the first time in the Netherlands.

Ringgold now also provides one of the highlights of the exhibition Tell Me Your Story, with which the Amersfoort-based Kunsthal KAdE presents the most important survey of black American art ever seen in the Low Countries (Knack). Meet the core figures of African-American art and discover their story as soon as Kunsthal KAdE can reopen to the public.

The fall exhibition - looking at the social/political position of contemporary American artists in the run-up to the presidential election on Nov. 3 - remains on the schedule. This exhibition is scheduled from Sept. 26, 2020 through Jan. 3, 2021.

The exhibition was made possible in part by the Mondriaan Fund and by the national government: the National Cultural Heritage Agency granted an indemnity guarantee on behalf of the Minister of Education, Culture and Science.