The Sarr Collection

Two lengths of cloth, one indigo, one black, caught suspended against a pale sky where the sea dissolves into the horizon. This is Cap Spartel, the northwestern tip of Africa, where the Atlantic meets the Mediterranean and where the idea of a border becomes both literal and impossibly abstract.
In Indigo (Beyond the conclusive logic of monumentality), Dawit L. Petros gives us something weightless and charged at once. The fabric hangs in the air like a body mid-flight, like something released or something lost. Indigo carries its own deep history, a dye bound up in centuries of trade, labor, and movement across this very coastline. Here it becomes a gesture, a fragment of presence held against the vast indifference of sky and water.

Petros resists the monument, the fixed marker, the conclusive statement. Instead he offers suspension, the in-between moment of crossing, the threshold itself. It asks us to sit with the precarity of passage and to recognize the human aspiration carried within it.

A quiet, powerful meditation on migration, memory, and the borders we inherit and contest.

The Work
Dawit L. Petros
Indigo (Beyond the conclusive logic of monumentality, Part II), Cap Spartel, Morocco, 2016
Archival pigment print
51 × 63.5 cm (20 × 25 in)
Edition of 3 + 1 AP

Angèle Etoundi Essamba
Vintage Prints, 1985–2006
Collection of the Sarr Collection

This week, the Sarr Collection highlights a selection of vintage silver gelatin prints by renowned Cameroonian photographer Angèle Etoundi Essamba.

Born in Douala in 1962 and based in Amsterdam, Essamba has spent more than four decades redefining the representation of Black femininity through photography. Working almost exclusively in black and white, her images explore identity, memory, beauty, spirituality, and cultural inheritance through striking compositions centered on gesture, texture, hair, and the body.

The works featured here, all hand-developed by the artist between 1985 and 2006, belong to her celebrated Vintage Prints series and include: Le Café, Tresses, Double Héritage, Kiwi, Présence, and Fragments de Mémoire.

Essamba’s photographs are held in major institutional collections including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art.

At once intimate and monumental, her work reminds us that portraiture can be both aesthetic and deeply political: an affirmation of presence, dignity, and memory.

Germane Barnes .barnes
Migration Column III (detail), 2024
Designed by Germane Barnes, fabricated by Navillus Woodworks
Courtesy of the artist
Image credit: Germane Barnes / Art Institute of Chicago

In Migration Column III, Germane Barnes transforms wood into movement, rhythm, and structure.

Carved from poplar with extraordinary precision, the work merges sculptural form with architectural language. Its deeply contoured surfaces evoke erosion, topography, and the natural flow of material over time, while the split composition introduces a subtle tension between continuity and fragmentation.

As in much of Barnes’s practice, the work exists at the intersection of architecture, memory, and the body. The title Migration suggests movement and transition, while the carved grain of the wood preserves traces of natural history within an intensely contemporary form.

Designed by Barnes and fabricated in collaboration with Navillus Woodworks, the piece reflects the artist’s ongoing interest in craft, material intelligence, and spatial storytelling.