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Under A plantain Tree: Notes on Liberation
June 19 - August 14
Tuesday through Saturday
9 am - 9 pm
Jamaica Arts Center
161-04 Jamaica Ave
Jamaica, NY 11432
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Under A plantain TREE: NOTES ON LIBERATION
Opens June 19 • Curated by: Dr. Margarita Lila Rosa
Join us for the highly anticipated exhibit Under A Plantain Tree: Notes on Liberation.
Beneath the broad, sheltering leaves of the plantain tree—a diasporic archive rooted across the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Black Atlantic—liberation is neither singular nor complete. It is iterative, fugitive, and unfinished. Juneteenth marks not a moment of arrival, but a delayed recognition: freedom announced after its supposed decree, conditions that remain beyond emancipation.
In this space, the works of Ronald “EFE” Ramirez, Jeffrey Merris, Zion Estrada, Laurena Finéus, and Luis Gutierrez gather as notes—partial, resonant, and ongoing. Under the plantain tree, we to sit with the incompleteness of emancipation—to understand freedom as something lived in the shadow of its delay, and still, insisted upon.
ABOUT Dr. Margarita Lila Rosa
Margarita Lila Rosa is a Dominican historian and independent curator, based in New York, and specializing in Afro-diasporic history and modern and contemporary art. She received her Ph. D from Princeton University. Rosa was a part of the inaugural Studio Museum in Harlem’s Arts Praxis class and she was a recipient of the Early Stage Arts Professional Fellowship by the A & L Berg Foundation. She has written for the Museum of Modern Art and has art history essays in The Brooklyn Rail, i-D, and Frieze, along with articles in journals including the Caribbean Quarterly and the Journal of African American History.
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