Marking the closing week of RAGGA NYC’s residency and exhibition, this evening event featured performance, poetry, and music from a group of artists in the RAGGAcommunity. This program was organized on the occasion of the exhibition and residency “RAGGA NYC: All the threatened and delicious things joining one another,” presented through the Department of Education and Public Engagement’s R&D Season: BODY.

RAGGA, a platform founded by Christopher Udemezue, connects a community of queer Caribbean artists working across a wide range of disciplines—including visual art, fashion, and poetry—to explore how race, sexuality, gender, heritage, and history inform their work and their lives. A vibrant community deeply committed to education and grassroots organizing, RAGGA fosters a network and an extended family that make space for solidarity, celebration, and expression. Their residency will explore Afro-Caribbean diasporic traditions, bringing together works by a group of artists who trace their own relationships to Caribbean history and take up Édouard Glissant’s claim that “the language of the Caribbean artist does not originate in the obsession with celebrating his inner self; this inner self is inseparable from the future evolution of his community [in which] he is his own ethnologist, historian, [and] linguist.” The exhibition title quotes Glissant’s description of a world in which beings can come together under a veil of opacity and create a new model of relation that preserves difference.