The first thing visitors see at “What We Carry Forward,” on view at The Sun ATL through Nov. 21, is a woman in a long red-and-black robe. She stands in a golden landscape beside a domed church while a small figure rides a high-wheeled bicycle near her feet. The painting, Carlos Solis’ “The Vision of Saint Charles” (2021), holds what the curator Eric Bomba-Ire calls “childhood and adulthood, memory and dream, spirituality and imagination.” “I knew the exhibition needed that kind of beginning, where imagination comes before explanation,” said Bomba-Ire, who conceived the show and co-curated it with art dealer and gallerist Shawn Vinson.
The question at the center of the show is one Bomba-Ire has lived with since he arrived in Atlanta in 1997: “What happens to what we inherit when we move between countries, cities, communities, even the everyday spaces we move through?”
Bomba-Ire grew up between Ghana, his home country, and Côte d’Ivoire, his adoptive one, and Atlanta is where, he says, he began “learning what it means to carry one place into another.”
The idea driving ‘What We Carry Forward’
The idea for “What We Carry Forward” started taking shape last October, built around artists from different places meeting in Atlanta. Over the next year, the concept changed. It evolved into nine artists whose practices are rooted in Africa and Latin America, arranged in three movements. It also became the anchor exhibition for MENTAL 2.0, Inceptr’s monthlong Atlanta initiative on mental health and wellbeing.
Bomba-Ire developed the concept, framework and narrative. Every piece had to convey “a recognizable human condition: belonging, uncertainty, confinement, memory, movement, reconstruction, becoming,” he says. Belinda Camacho, the show’s exhibition and gallery partnership assistant, pulled a first round of works by artists represented by Gallery Miriam, an African contemporary art gallery in Fairburn, and Contrapunto, the Atlanta-based Latin American artist collective. Vinson selected works from Camacho’s list he thought would resonate with The Sun ATL’s audience. Bomba-Ire made the final call on what stayed and which movement it belonged in.
Three beats of ‘What We Carry Forward’
In the first movement, Roots of Imagination, Jean-Baptiste Djéka’s five 2023 portraits build faces from heavy black strokes over pink and green. Marvin K. Omede is there too, with paintings that include the crowded market scene “Plea Bargain” (2012). Omede’s work, Bomba-Ire said, brings inheritance into “everyday gathering, community, and movement.”
Then the perspective shifts.
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In Between Shores, the second movement, explores how identity can be, in Bomba-Ire’s words, “held, pressured, fragmented, or reassembled.” Barkinado Bocoum’s “Part of You” series (2024) constructs faces from grids of patterned squares. Antoine Goho’s 10-by-8-inch portraits, among them “There Is Beauty in Everyone” (2022), piece faces together from patterned fragments. “Bocoum and Goho both build a face from pieces: one holds them in a grid, the other lets them be reassembled,” Bomba-Ire said. Catalina Gomez, who came to Atlanta from Colombia, turns the pressure inward. Her “Hugging Dreams” (2023) shows a figure folded into its own arms. Her “Reaching Hand 1–2–3” (2024) sets painted hands into three torn, gilded surfaces.
The third movement, New Frequencies, opens with Pedro Fuertes, who came to Atlanta from Peru. His large abstractions, including the 48-by-60-inch “Pigeon Sanctuary” (2026), are works in which, Bomba-Ire says, “form appears before it can completely be named.” The show includes mixed-media canvases from 2012 by N’Doye Douts. Bomba-Ire described Douts’s pieces “Taxi 1” and “Car Rapide 1” as making place “a site of reorientation and formation.” The show ends with Casimir Bationo, known as CasziB, who renders figures in deep blues in paintings such as “Le Bleu de la Mer” (2020). “CasziB brings us back to the figure, but now the self itself is still forming,” Bomba-Ire said.
Bomba-Ire describes the show’s through line as “a loop, not a line.” He noted that Solis’ opening painting and Bationo’s closing works “could almost exchange places.”
Atlanta’s place in ‘What We Carry Forward’
Atlanta is in that loop too. “Atlanta isn’t only where the exhibition hangs,” Bomba-Ire says. “It is part of the argument.” Solis, Gomez and Fuertes have made the city home for years. Bationo returns often, and Bocoum and Djéka have exhibited here.
GloSo ATL, an Atlanta arts and cultural platform for contemporary art exhibitions, presents the show with The Sun ATL. Its focus, Bomba-Ire says, is the crossing of narratives between the Global South and the U.S. South. That premise shaped the lineup. “I wanted artists from Africa, Latin America, and the diaspora to shape one contemporary-art conversation within the U.S. South,” he says.
“What We Carry Forward” is on view through Nov. 21 at The Sun ATL.
