Sovereignty of Quiet brings together artists whose practices insist on interiority as a political and aesthetic position. Spanning painting, sculpture, photography, and drawing, the exhibition traces how Black artists across generations have articulated forms of self-possession that resist spectacle, legibility, and demand. Rather than framing visibility as liberation, the works assembled here consider quiet, restraint, and opacity as strategies of autonomy shaped by historical pressure and contemporary conditions.

From the formal elegance and psychological precision of Elizabeth Catlett and Charles White to the charged intimacy of Jennifer Packer and Paul Mpagi Sepuya, the exhibition foregrounds artists who attend to the complexities of representation without capitulating to narrative expectation. The figures and forms that emerge across the galleries are neither illustrative nor declarative. They operate instead through tonal subtlety, compositional rigor, and material sensitivity, inviting sustained looking and a slower mode of encounter. In works by Barkley Hendricks, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Tau Lewis, and Rashid Johnson, quiet functions not as withdrawal but as a calibrated refusal, a holding of space against flattening interpretation.

Presented at Tate Modern, Sovereignty of Quiet proposes a lineage of artistic practices that complicate dominant histories of Black expression by emphasizing deliberateness over declaration. The exhibition situates these artists not within a single movement or identity framework, but within a shared commitment to self-determined visual language. In doing so, it asks how museums might make room for forms of presence that do not announce themselves loudly, yet endure with clarity, force, and profound intention.

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