Nothing Thrown Away
Is Finished

Betye Saar passed in her sleep on July 26, at home in Los Angeles, four days short of turning one hundred. This past week in Santa Monica, a small circle of her people, artists, admirers, family in spirit if not always in blood, gathered to send her off properly. They called the evening Blues for Betye. What had been planned as a hundredth birthday tribute became something larger: a room full of people who understood exactly what this country loses when a woman like this one leaves it.

That was not the only current running through Global Africa this past week. An invitation to New York put me inside the fiftieth anniversary of Srnan Dey, the Surinamese diaspora's flagship celebration in Queens. A quick detour through Brooklyn put me face to face with a Dutch designer building garments that look like they escaped a coral reef. And back home, the countdown to Taste of AfriKin has entered the stretch where every week matters. All of it below.

The Woman Who Turned Salvage Into Scripture

Betye Irene Saar was born July 30, 1926, in the Watts section of Los Angeles. As a girl visiting her grandmother nearby, she watched Simon Rodia assemble the Watts Towers piece by scavenged piece, steel and cement pressed with shards of plate and tile, corn cobs, whatever the neighborhood had discarded. She would later call that her first real encounter with art, and the lesson never left her: nothing thrown away is actually finished.

She studied at Pasadena City College and continued at UCLA, then worked for years as a social worker before turning fully to her own practice. A Joseph Cornell retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1967 pushed her toward assemblage, and by 1969 she had produced Black Girl's Window, a self-portrait framed inside a salvaged window sash and layered with mystical symbols, the piece now considered her breakout work. Three years later came The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, an assemblage that took the mammy caricature sold to generations of American households and turned it into a woman armed and unbothered. It remains one of the defining works of the Black Arts Movement, a movement Saar helped build from the inside.

Blues for Betye

Yrneh Gabon and CCH Pounder in front of the installation they built in her honor. Photo by Lee Tonks.

Recognition came late in life but arrived in full. At 93, Saar held simultaneous solo exhibitions at LACMA and MoMA, and that same year received the Wolfgang Hahn Prize from the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. Her work had already anchored Tate Modern's landmark 2017 exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power. Across seven decades of flea market finds, clocks, dolls, ships, masks, mirrors, she built a body of work that carried African diasporic cosmology inside ordinary American materials, and she raised two daughters, Alison Saar and Lezley Saar, who carry that same instinct into their own celebrated careers.

AfriKin's own relationship to her work runs through a screening room, not a gallery wall. At the 2024 AfriKin Art Fair, we had the honor of presenting Ready to Be a Warrior, a documentary portrait of Saar directed by Angela Robinson Witherspoon. Witherspoon built the film from a place of genuine reverence, and it showed. Audiences left that screening with a fuller sense of a woman most people had only ever met through a museum wall label, and it gave this Chairman an education in a life he thought he already understood. Spearheaded by CCH Pounder, Yrneh Gabon, and Angela Robinson Witherspoon, Blues for Betye carried that same spirit into a living room in Santa Monica: soup, libations, conversation, and love filling every corner for a woman whose creativity and generosity defined an era. She was never only an artist, and never only an activist. She was one of the real ones, and the culture owes her the retelling.

Srnan Dey Turns Fifty in Queens

An invitation to New York put me inside the fiftieth edition of Srnan Dey, the three-day gathering the Surinamese diaspora has built into one of the largest of its kind in the United States, running July 31 through August 2 in Queens. This was not a routine year. Suriname sent an official delegation, representatives from government ministries, entrepreneurs, artists, and cultural organizations, on a mission that was as much economic as it was cultural, organized by the Suriname Family Day Committee alongside Benjamin Jansen Business Support. Fifty years of a diaspora keeping a homeland present in its bones does not happen by accident, and this milestone edition made that intention explicit, with a cultural evening, a football tournament, a pre-party, and the grand Srnan Dey Celebration itself, headlined by the Surinamese formations Showtime and OpMaat, who both flew in for the occasion.

Srnan Dey, Queens

With the Surinamese delegation at the fiftieth anniversary celebration. Photo by Barry Holness.

The music carried the weekend, but the real education for me sat underneath it, in Winti. Winti is the Afro-Surinamese spiritual tradition carried by enslaved Africans brought to Suriname and kept alive across centuries of Dutch colonial rule, syncretized the way Vodou, Santería, and Candomblé were built elsewhere across this hemisphere. Watching it explained through traditional dance rather than through a textbook changed how I understood a country I thought I already knew. And then there was the eating, and the shopping. Pepper sauce, marinades, spices, the kind of goods that do not fully translate outside Paramaribo, went straight into my suitcase, because a country's Africanness lives in its pantry as much as its ceremony.

Suriname is one of fifteen confirmed nations at Taste of AfriKin this September. Watching this diaspora hold its culture this tightly, this publicly, in Queens is exactly the energy Maison AfriKin is built to host on Labor Day.

Sculpting the Senses: Iris van Herpen at the Brooklyn Museum

A quick detour before I left New York took me to the Brooklyn Museum for Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses, her first major New York exhibition and the North American debut of a show that has already traveled from Paris to Brisbane to Singapore to Rotterdam. More than one hundred forty pieces of haute couture sit alongside coral, fossils, and natural history specimens, on view now through December 6.

Sculpting the Senses

Inside the Iris van Herpen retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. Collage by Alfonso D. Brooks.

My friend Alessandra has a theory that if aliens are walking among us, Van Herpen is one of them, and an afternoon inside this show makes the case hard to argue with. Garments built to move like water, structures that reference coral reefs and neural tissue, a level of craftsmanship that treats fabric like it owes her an explanation. I could have spent days in that museum and still left with more ideas than I arrived with. Van Herpen is Dutch, and the Netherlands should claim this career loudly. As someone who carries Dutch citizenship alongside American, watching a fellow countrywoman command this level of global attention for a craft built entirely on her own terms is its own kind of pride. Kudos to her for a career well earned.

A Souptealious Summer to Remember

Courtesy of Yrneh Gabon

The Call Has Closed

One submission window closes as another season opens. As of August 1, the Call to Artists for the 12th Annual AfriKin Art Fair, GRIOT: Urgent Storytelling for Our Times, curated by Dr. Joseph L. Underwood, is officially closed. Portfolios, proposals, and artist statements came in from across dozens of countries, and our team is now moving through that pool with the same care this fair has built its reputation on. Every artist who submitted will hear from us. Miami Art Week runs November 29 through December 6, and what gets selected from this cycle will define GRIOT's twelfth year.

The Countdown to Taste of AfriKin

September 6 is closer than it feels. Fifteen confirmed nations, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Cabo Verde, Eritrea, Ghana, Haiti, Jamaica, Martinique, Nigeria, Senegal, Sint Maarten, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, and the United States, will bring their tables to Maison AfriKin this Labor Day, and the tiers are moving the way they move every year at this point on the calendar: steadily, then suddenly. Every ticket tier at Taste of AfriKin is capped. Once a tier sells out, the next one opens at a higher price for the same seat at the same table. The move that costs nothing right now is buying today instead of in three weeks.

Taste of AfriKin 2026

Fifteen nations, one table. September 6, Maison AfriKin.

The room will move to sound from four corners of Global Africa. Rozz Parker Band returns after last year's performance, bringing soul and Motown built to move a room full of plates straight onto its feet. Saxophonist Connis Vanterpool carries the sound of Sint Maarten onto brass. Jerilyn Davis represents Nigeria on a stage built around the same diaspora pride driving the Jollof Cook-Off happening a few feet away. And Binghi Blaze closes the night with Jamaica's sound, a lineup that spans the Continent, the Caribbean, and the diaspora in between, one set at a time.

Upcoming AfriKin Events

Build the Permanent Home

Every ticket sold this fall funds a single evening. AfriKin's capital campaign funds the institution that makes every evening possible. We are raising $300,000 to convert a decade of proven cultural relevance, exhibitions, press, and civic recognition, into a permanent home at Maison AfriKin: secured infrastructure, a funded season, and the staffing to operate as a lasting institution rather than a reconstituted event series each year.

The AfriKin Ecosystem

AfriKin does not live on one website, and it was never meant to. Five properties carry different parts of the same mandate, each one built from the start to point back toward the others.